Mochalight by-WM5 Wireless Lavalier Microphone for Canon, Nikon, Sony DSLR Camera Camcorder Audio Recorder

5 stars for what it is. An ENTRY LEVEL Mic system with surprisingly-good sound. I don't understand why people insist on detracting stars from a review when a BASIC product doesn't have an advanced feature. Yes, view screens are common nowadays on phones and such, but it was obvious to me that the money spent in producing this device went into the SOUND. And at this point that is what is important to me. I just know that as part of my pre-job workflow, to recharge my eneloop AAA batteries before every job, (JUST LIKE MY CAMERA!) and to swap-in a set of fresh spares during a break if a shoot runs long. Now for something that I haven't seen in other reviews that I personally would have found helpful: On both my D800 & D7100, I got the best results with virtually NO HISS, when I set the camera's movie mode settings to "MANUAL" from "AUTO". (Auto will almost always give you hiss/noise at some point when your talent stops speaking or gets quieter, so please don't blame the mic system for a poor choice of settings.) I set the MIC level at 4. (A setting of 1 works, but I had to raise the level in post production when I was testing things out. Mic setting 4 seemed like a good balance as 5 & higher started to introduce distortion and noise artifacts.). I reversed the Lavalier in its clip as it was oriented to work on a female button-side, and my subject was male. (Used a small screwdriver to gently pop it out of its clip and reverse it.)So, does it sound as good as a $600-plus Sennheiser? No. Does an older model Dodge Dart perform as well as a new Ferrari? No. So don't expect this to. What it does do for me is to provide even cleaner, noise-free sound than I was getting with a voice recorder and eliminates the audio-synch steps entirely. Maybe one day I will experiment with upgrading the Lavalier mic, but for now it does the job better than I expected it to. My intended purposes: Indoor interview-style setups where camera is likely no more than 20 feet from the talent.

In the right circumstance this can be a useful product but it comes with what I consider to be some significant issues. I can't decide if the very short battery life or the noise level tops my list of issues but both are present. My experience has been that the battery life is less than 2 hours which limits this product's usefulness for me as I capture a lot of events that run longer than this. The lack of any indicator for battery power makes this issue a little more difficult to deal with in live settings.The noise issue can be fixed in post and in some cases may not be too noticeable but in quite times the noise is very evident to me. It seems to live around -35 db and while it can be easily removed ( I use Adobe Audition ) it adds an extra step that really should not be necessary.The units also have volume controls which is great except there is nothing to indicate what the volume setting is so there is some amount of fiddling to get it right. I have found that setting the transmitter volume pretty low reduces the noise level quite a bit but without any indication of the volume level it's hard to repeat a setting.As a side note the mic input for the transmitter is TRRS so if you want to use alternate dynamic mics you will need to get an adapter such as the Rode SC4 Microphone Cable which works great for this. I also found the earbuds to be useless, they are the large buttons and fall out constantly.Even with the above issues I still use the product on a regular basis and have found the audio quality to be good with no dropouts (so far).

I think this is a good product but may not meet the audio standards of some users. My application does not require great fidelity but I noticed a moderate level of "hiss" before I started using it.It also seem to have Automatic Level Control by default, so it would not be very good for music because there would be no dynamic range. This may also account for the "HISS" because the level is ramped up when there is silence in the room.My concern is battery life. The specs say the transmitter draws 110 ma. In fact it draws 190-210 when you are using it to transmit a sound to its receiver. At a discharge rate of 200 ma, alkaline batteries like Duracell will be good for 4 to 5 hours if the unit is used continuously. In my application, I needed an 8 hour day before changing batteries. As it is I will have to replace the batteries at lunch every day.I still rate it as a "4" because I don't know of anything better in the price range.

It is either very poor quality or I got something that just didn't work.

Wish it had a battery life indicator but otherwise it's awesomesauce!