I so LOVE the PCM-D50. But from what I read on this thread, the M10 has some very attractive attributes of its own.
Sorry to hear about your PCM-D50
By far, the build on the PCM-D50 is so much better than the PCM-M10. The PCM-M10 just has a metal face, the rest is plastic with a capital P. Not that I mind, but Sony should re-consider using silver paint to simulate metal on a device in its pro line-up (of all things). The whole perimeter of the device won't hold up to wear and tear gracefully. The POWER/HOLD switch and REC LEVEL knob are all-plastic coated in silver paint
To their credit, the knob has more useful ridges for more grip, but is smaller to offset the ease of that, somewhat - but still feels good and will be really difficult to accidentally move, as others have mentioned.
If we open the memory card door we can see the plastic underside is really grey. Would it have killed them to just leave it uncoated grey? Or offer plastic in any other colour (white, red, brown, green, blue, orange, whatever) except silver? I look at the PCM-D50's quality lustrous metal and then look at the PCM-M10 and can't help but being reminded of the cheapest toy. I don't mind plastic at all, but painting it silver... ugh. The size of the device is really welcome, though. Can't be stressed enough. In fact the main things for me are:
* dedicated FOLDER, MENU and DELETE buttons
* track-marking (far more flexible than mandatory slicing and dicing of files with DIVIDE. Divide can be performed on every track mark if you wish, too.
* size
* display showing recording time remaining permanently on the main screen (love it)
* Key Control (you can give your voice a sex change with this thing too, which is fun)
* Protect feature
* remote
* in-built speaker (tiny but does the job)
* bass enhancement is something that pretty much says "yes, go forth and use it as a Walkman, Joe Customer".
MiniDisc may not be dead, but this is the closest thing to killing it (recent price cuts pretty much tell me it may be the end of the road, too). The lack of drive mechanism and the rest must make devices like this a lot more lucrative to make, too (same can be said for their video cameras).
LCF and Limiter both work well. External mic, you get offered the choice of Plug-In Power or not. All familiar stuff. You will love the size of this unit.
DisplayI prefer text display on the PCM-M10. For example, if "decision" is written on the display, on the PCM-D50 every letter is evenly-spaced regardless of letter width. One the PCM-M10, letters like "i" don't have huge gaps between them and other letters. It's more pleasing to read.
headphone outputThe headphone output on this unit is noticeably less loud than the PCM-D50, but that only matters if you like to listen loud and/or are using high-impedance/low-sensitivity headphones. I prefer the meat in the PCM-D50 here, but the PCM-M10 is not bad by any means.
Sonically it's a very fine recorder! I'd have no problems substituting this unit for the PCM-D50 at all. But I do prefer the movable mics in the PCM-D50, though.
MP3, AACThere are other small differences in-use, but they are mostly minor interface things I won't mention. I don't record in MP3 but that's new. An AAC file I tried in it didn't work (they say not all encoders are supported, but this AAC file worked fine in the PSP...). Anyway, those are some things people will find useful but they are essentially nice bonuses to me, not much else.
The main points to take home versus the PCM-D50:
* build quality nothing like it (The PCM-D50 is so well-built, it would be hard to match many devices against it. I regard it as nothing less than a Sony classic)
* sounds great
* faux silver
* no optical digital in or out
* small (extremely good)
* MicroSD (!)
* useful remote for recording
Sony simply deserve the business this round. Thank god the competition made them move their butts (finally) to offer something like this. They deserve to be rewarded and I hope they sell bucketloads - but I hope the
tacky silver paint stays on.
I would hate to be their competition selling at this price point (or indeed MiniDisc)