Sennheiser MKE 400

The Sennheiser MKE 400 is a shotgun microphone designed to attach into the hot shoe mounts of DSLR and mirrorless cameras. This new, 2nd-gen of MKE 400 model looks and sounds like a serious piece of prosumer gear, but more casual video shooters need not look away: the MKE 400 also has a naive side that can incredibly boost the quality of smartphone camera clips as well.

We have been using the Sennheiser MKE 400 for quite a while and this is the new offering from Sennheiser for the in their MKE range and this effectively is the upgraded version of the MKE 200 mic, which we had reviewed earlier. The price of this mic is ₹16,900 and it is now almost two times the cost of the MKE 200. While not every aspiring videographer will find it a complete recording solution, the MKE 400 can still be one of the best microphones for amateur video recording. Let’s find how it performed and if you should buy it or no?

Design, Body and Look

Sennheiser MKE 400 is big daddy of the MKE 200 and it is also very compact in size and light in weight despite being bigger in size than the MKE 200. The increasing the size also comes with a new set of features that give you more customizable options over the sound quality that a videographer would like to take control over.

The MKE 400 is powered by 2 AAA batteries which are expected to last 100 hours of recording time as promised by Sennheiser and on the opposite hand the MKE 200 is directly powered by the camera. It also has 3 new buttons to control the recorded sound. On the left side is the Power On/Off button along with the Input Gain settings which can be tuned depending on how far the subject is. Apart from this, it also consist of a filter noise button which will minus out the background noise if needed.