Olympus VN-4100PC Digital Voice Recorder

I am very pleased with the Olympus Voice Recorder, it is much better than anything I've ever used. It's also very simple to operate. I would recommend this to anyone who is in the market for a recorder.

I bought this because I thought it was the same DVR I use at my university. However, it clearly is not the same one, because even though it has a USB connection, it doesn't work with Macs for some reason. This was so disappointing (especially because I found out AFTER I had recorded a two-hour interview that I needed to transcribe for a research class).

I like the recording quality - the mic picks everything up really well. Also, this model has plenty of space for hours and hours of recording. It's also easy to use. Of course, all of that won't do you much good if you need to get the audio files onto your Mac - so I'd recommend this only if you have a Windows-based computer. But really, this product is flawed because it ought to work on any computer, so I'm giving it two stars for that reason.

Bought this so that my daughters can take it with them to their music class and record the teacher's singing for practice. The quality of the recording is excellent for this purpose. I have also used it to record the minutes of a long meeting at work and I could transcribe the minutes from this recorder without any problems whatsoever even though some of the speakers were more than a dozen feet from the recorder in the room.

Operation is also intuitive and simple (even though the use of the record button as a pause button during recording is not intuitive). The user's manual is short and succinct and I don't have any sympathy for people who complain about the product without reading and understanding the manual.

The PC software that comes with the recorder is not anything to write home about, but it works as advertised. The resulting files on the computer can be used as is or they can be transcoded into mp3 using simple and free tools like audacity or mediacoder.

The product comes with batteries, USB cord and a software CD, so it is good to go pretty much out of the box. No extra stuff to buy before you can use it. I have used the product only in the highest quality recording mode so far (XHQ) because it provides about 11 hours of recording even in that mode and I can't imagine needing more recording time than that before I either transfer the recordings to my PC or listen to them and discard them. I am guessing that the lower qualities will be usable for speech, but perhaps not for music.

Overall, the product earns a full 5 stars out of 5. I would buy another without hesitation if I had to.

Nice recorder, but they neglect to mention in the website regarding the product that *it doesn't work with Vista*. So I bought this recorder 3 months ago, and then got a new Vista laptop. Now I have to buy another recorder. I"m not very happy about this, since neither Amazon nor Olympus mentioned this very relevant detail.

Very user friendly, price is right and it looks nice too.
Great voice pick up even with using the additional mic.