Olympus VN-1800 Digital Voice Recorder

 (6 customer reviews)

Review for Voice Recorder VN 1800 and VN 900.Pretty good machine, does basically what I need it to do !
Overall good value and functionality for the price.Although this is not the perfect device of my dreams with all the features I would like to see
it is a good replacement for my old voice recorder...I bought the VN 900 with advertised 90 min of recording time.
The fact is on high quality you get 22.5 minutes and that is plenty enough.
Before I had 11 minutes which I never used.
Remember this is a voice recorder to take notes and reminders that you would
otherwise put on sticky notes, not a recorder for whole meetings. If you look
for a recorder for meetings you are in fact better off with a tape recorder.
For taking notes it is great because you can do it while riding a bike, a car, on a plane,where ever you are and want to take a note, without taking out a note pad and end up
with messy pieces of paper.
Best ideas...Read more

This has good, crisp sound at the HQ setting. The full range of the mic shows on a larger speaker if you dub it from the headphone jack. The mic is very sensitive (on high) and is able to pick up sounds near and far without over-amplifying the nearer ones.The sound quality is fair at the medium setting and almost unusable at the longest-play setting, so don't take the maximum rec time at face value with these units. I've yet to use all 45 minutes at HQ, so this is perfect for my mental note taking and to-do lists at home. People who record entire lectures or meetings might go with a pricier model and more memory unless they want to strain their hearing with the compressed modes.There are no worries about losing data if batteries die (flash memory) and battery life appears to live up to the 33 hour rating. It's still on "full" after 4 months if that can be trusted. The ergonomics seem clever and they did their best to keep the unit tiny. I think critics of the jog-pad...Read more

The new VN1800 from olympus is a very good product! I see it as a next generation compared to my older VN90. The most impressive differences to me are the smaller size and the better sound. There is also a fourth directory and buttons are more intuitive with the jogdial. The size is now about 3 inches versus 4 inches, allowing the VN1800 to hold in a pocket without deforming it or hurting. The sound quality in HQ mode is very crisp allowing to better recognize all kinds of sounds, even mixes of noises, voices and music. It is no longer a struggle to understand voicenotes I took in my car with ambiant city noise.The consomation is low: i measured about 0.1mA standby, 40mA play (low volume) 30mA rec mode. So batteries must last a while
I also did a test of replacing the batteries within reasonable time (10sec) and thank god the messages were not lost.The VN1800 will always be with me, attached to my keys with an extendable cord.
Note: sometimes under harsch frictions and...Read more