I have a friend who has the Zoom H1 and he is very pleased with it. I have used it a little and was very impressed by ease of use and sound. The only cheap digital recorder I tried produced very disappointing results with spoken sound.

A less expensive alternative could be to record directly to the computer though the microphone input. Audacity is downloadable freeware that can be set to record any sound played through the computer and saves to wav and mp3 files. I am not sure what the best quality of mp3 may be but if not good enough you can export the wav file to be converted by any number of conversion programs.