VideoMic Rycote : great peice for any photographer

I bought this as a christmas present for an aspiring photographer with and interest in video i have yet to give ut to them but i tryed it out myself. Its a shotgun microphone so the sound source as very auidle and removes quite a bit of outside noise. The dead cat is great and stops wind and pops as it should. The best feature on this is the shockmount, it moves quite freely when moved and makes no noise, the downside to this is the 9 volt battery needed to run the microphone. The cover is also hard to remove and some of it feels quite flimsy because of the plastic so make sure it wont be dropped. They really should have included some sort of bag or case to leave this in as it can easily break.