It might sound crazy, but I got one of these or a few dollars at a thrift shop in the mid 2000s and used to use it to record shows onto a portable Minidisc recorder (also from the thrift shop) when I was playing out with bands a lot, and the recordings held up really, really well. Comparable to what I get with the Zoom h5 I use now if not better. Runs on one or two AA batteries (I forget which, haven’t used it in a few years) fr a few hours and has stereo 1/4" outputs. If you can find one cheap you could do a whole lot worse.
I can’t speak to the noise level though, since everything I ever recorded with it was loud music in a noisy environment, so any self-noise was completely covered.
It’s not quite compact, though, comparable to an SM58 (slightly bigger but also much lighter).
EDIT: these are from the same era as when Radio Shack was selling OEM versions of high end Crown PZM mics at really low prices, so it’s not totally surprising that it’s decent.
EDIT: I just checked eBay and it looks like you can still get them complete in the original box for $20-$25 easily (and more like $10-$15 without the box). That’s a lot more than they used to be but still reasonable in my opinion. Also, it has a 600ohm output impedence, which is dead on for most line level inputs.