Portable Audio Recorder for Interviews?

Hi everyone! I searched around the forums and found a few portable recorders mentioned often that are in my price range (Edirol R09, Zoom H line, Tascam), but I'm not sure which or if another one will best fit my uses.

I'm looking to get a portable recorder under $300 and a mic. Not sure what the budget is for the mic yet, but I know they want it to be as cheap as possible without making things sound as terrible as a crappy camera's built-in mic recording in a tornado LOL.

I need it mostly to record interviews for a show we do. Someone is shooting the interviews and we want a mic for the interviewer to hold and pass back and forth. We'll also sometimes need it to be able to take a lavalier as well if we ever need something more hidden.

It'll be nice if it has directional mics built-in as well because sometimes we have weird performances where we want to hide mics in strange places and it'd be so much easier if we could just hide a recorder there instead.

So far as the recording format, we'd love it to be uncompressed and record to SD cards. The overall quality should just be as good as possible for the price. Lastly, it'd be great if it had a usb port.

Anyway, that's what we need and we're not sure what recorders of the ones I mentioned or what mics would be good for us because we've never recorded with portable recorders before. Do they have multiple inputs for mics? It'd be perfect if we could have two mics in at once, but let me know if that means we'd have to go higher in budget.

We don't have an opportunity to test the quality of any of these before we buy so it'll be great to hear from people who have used some or all of them.

Any help would be appreciated!!!