| I have a Sony PCM-D1 and I can't say enough good things about it. For physical toughness I don't see how it can be beat. The best battery life comes by running it on Alkalines (rather than rechargables), and minimizing the monitoring you do on it. I think you can get about 8 hours out of it in that mode.
If you really wanted to go bananas with battery life, you could get a 6V lantern battery (or a couple in parallel) and feed them into the charger input of the unit. This would work, with the appropriate voltage, for any of these recorders. You could probably get almost a whole day of operation out of the thing in that way.
I used to own the predecessor of the Marantz unit you are looking at (the 670). It was not in the same class as the Sony unit, neither in terms of physical construction nor in terms of sound.
I'm not sure the Sony is the right choice if you're not going to use its built-in mics however. They really make the unit, and they are no doubt a big fraction of its price. It doesn't have XLR inputs or phantom power.
-synthoid |