Small digital recorder - experiences?

In gathering audio for our Web site we've tried several options. We found the digital voice recorders like those from Olympus or the Sony that bdy000 describes to be not high-enough quality and not flexible enough.

We also used Sony and Sharp minidisc recorders and they work very well in terms of quality, portability and flexibility but have one major drawback. You can plug them directly into a PC but you have to play the file in real time to make a transfer, there's no drag-and-drop of the digital file. That's an anti-piracy measure imposed by Sony, the creater of the format, that cripples the device to some extent. Once you've got the file transferred it's very high quality, though.

What we've settled on is the Marantz PMD660. It does what you describe extremely well but it's definitely bigger than you'd like. It's $500 and bulletproof, uses Compact Flash cards and requires the use of external microphones.

As Gloomydan suggests, there are several external microphone options for the iPod from companies like Griffin, Belkin and XtremeMac. I don't have any experience with them but there's considerable information at ilounge.

Sorry, I forgot to add another option that we experimented with and that sounds closest to what you're describing.

We bought an Archos Jukebox Recorder 10 and almost everything about it worked well, USB interface, rechargeable AA batteries, external microphone jack, digital input and output and small size. The reason we switched to the minidisc recorders is that the interface for creating and managing the files on the Archos was a little too complicated to be able to put it into the hands of a reporter or photographer who didn't use it often and trust that they'd actually come back with something. That wouldn't be a problem if you used it a lot.

I'm not familiar with the current Archos models but the Recorder 10 and 20 machines are always for sale on ebay and at the prices they go for they're probably worth trying, even if you end up using them only as a USB back-up drive. There are probably other mp3 players out there with similar capabilities, I've heard the iRiver players recommended as recorders.