Olympus DS-30 Digital Voice Recorder by Olympus
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List Price: Our Price: $139.99 You Save: $59.01 (30%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more digital camera details and other models |
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Digital camera reviews of Olympus DS-30 Digital Voice Recorder
Digital camera Review: Excellent in functionality, but may be defective
Summary: 3 Stars
I got this recorder last week, it worked perfectly for my purpose. I really love it.
But I cannot turn it on today. I've checked the battery, and even tried my 3v DC power supply. It just didn't start. Fortunately, it is still not too late to return it. I've shipped back this unit and ordered a new one. I wish I just got a defective one by chance.
Digital camera Review: Excellent little recorder
Summary: 4 Stars
I need to record all phone calls coming into or going out of my law office. For decades we used a cassette tape system that required lots of tapes, which we recycled after 90 days. I picked this recorder as a digital replacement and upgrade because it operates off of AC power, with an adaptor, in addition to batteries. That allows us to just plug it in to the phone line (with a different adaptor) using the mike jack and leave it on at all times with the voice operated recording feature on. No call, no recording. And by using it on AC power I save having to buy and constantly replace batteries as I would have to do with just about every other unit out there that operates on batteries only. We have used it for some weeks now and it records all our voice calls perfectly. The PC software it came with installs on Windows XP with no problems and works fine. I found it very easy to transfer recordings to my laptop using the included USB cable. Only negative is that the built in speaker is pretty much worthless as you have to hold it to your ear to hear well. But once the files are transferred to a PC and played back on PC speakers, the sound quality and volume is great. I would buy another if I needed one.Digital camera Review: Excellent, intutitive product
Summary: 5 Stars
I chose this over many other DVRs I looked into and an verry happy with it. Will work with a Mac if you use a freeware program to convert the WMA files into one of several formats compatible with iTunes.Digital camera Review: Extremely high quality for low price in a nice little package
Summary: 5 Stars
I purchased two of these recorders a few months ago for the shared use of my team at work. Every colleague who has used one has come back to me and told me they're impressed.
I didn't go for the more expensive DS-40 model simply because the only real advantage seems to be that it has 500MB of space instead of the 250 offered by the DS-30. While that translates to being able to make recordings twice as long as those made by the DS-30, this is an advantage only if you're recording away from your computer for long periods of more than four hours. But if you work in an office environment in which a computer is readily available for USB transfer of files, you don't need more than 250MB of storage and therefore the DS-30 is an excellent choice.
The best thing about this recorder is its ease of use. The basics are fairly simple: there are five settings for audio quality, which also determine the number of hours you can record before the recorder's memory is full (the higher the quality, the fewer hours and the more space taken up). I always use the highest setting (stereo extra high-quality), which records a little over four hours of audio and records clear, crisp audio. I've always found the lowest setting to sound a bit garbled and therefore I don't use it, but the other settings are more than adequate to moderately adequate. To be honest, I've never really had to record more than four hours of audio yet.
You can also tune the sensitivity of the microphone to tailor it for recordings in very large settings, meeting room settings, or single one-on-one (dictation) situations. And if you're recording in an area with lots of consistent noise (like an air-conditioned room or on an airplane), you can enable a setting that cancels out the low-frequency hum in your recorded audio. It's fun to experiment with these configurations, and makes the recorder a lot more geek-friendly to those who want to be geeky about it.
My favorite aspect of this recorder is the "index mark" feature, which lets you set an index mark at any time within the recorded audio file by pressing a button. You can add up to 16 index marks per file (and the recorder can have an almost unlimited number of audio files). This is extremely helpful when you want to tag particular moments during a conversation, brainstorm, or meeting. And while other reviewers have commented that installing the free software isn't necessary, it's necessary if you want to use the index mark feature. (The index marks aren't readable by your basic audio tools like iTunes, WinAmp, and Windows Media Player.)
In general, I would recommend this recorder to any person who wants to make high-quality, inexpensively-produced, relatively short recordings.
Digital camera Review: First Recorder...I like it
Summary: 5 Stars
I've never owned one of these before, so I didn't know what to expect. My impressions so far are that the sound is super, and it is pretty easy to use. The software doesn't seem to want to let me convert WMA files to WAV files. The conversion utility isn't active on the menu. That's a little irritating. Need to do some research on that. I want to use it primarily to do interviews for family histories and was worried I would need to buy a lapel mike, but I can see this thing is going to pick up voices from a distance without any problem. Now my challenge is to invent other cool applications for this tool.