Olympus VN-5000 Digital Voice Recorder (141985) (Silver)

Comment: My experience was that you need perfect conditions to make a good recording. Even being in a moving car with the windows closed seemed too big of a problem for this machine, producing a shaky and unclear recording.

Comment: I bought this for an 89 year old man who relies on lists, but is having trouble with his hands. This is a very basic recorder, and for these purposes, worked great. I think on the very loud volume setting, it is a little muffled/slurred sounding, but unless you have it cranked up really high, it's just fine. Great little recorder.

Comment: Sound quality is good and clean in best SQ mode which gives you 20 hrs recording time. The down side for me is although it has pitch control for fast forward or rewind on playback it does not operate nearly as good as comparable Sony recorders especially if you need to scan through stuff while listening at more than 50% faster or slower speeds (you can FF or rewind very fast BUT not while listening to it as sound is muted so a 50% speed-up or slow down is the only pitch varience there is for listening). It's not a bad recorder though and has a record timer which the sony's mentioned does not and that can be handy but I returned mine and bought a Sony icd-bx700 and SQ is better with the built-in mic being the reason since it's sensitivity is superior and seems to replicate sound more naturally but it does cost a few bucks more. That's not to say SQ is bad on this Oylympus and far from it but I do like the Sony much better.

Another thing is this Olympus does not have a usb port so if quick tranfers of files to computer is a must look elsewhere. For more rudimentary recordings like notes-to-self and for lectures in average sized classrooms this Olympus would be perfectly fine and feels nice in hand as the design is very good and it also looks sharp so that part I did really like but for anything more than that like recording lectures in bigger halls or even live music I would definately recommend the Sony icd-bx700 or the identical icd-px720 which adds usb port and both those recorders have stereo recording capability which this Olympus does not.

In short a good recorder for the money with a very nice design for basic recordng tasks like note-taking or use with averaged sized classroom lectures but just remember it has no usb port.


Note: Although I mentioned 2 Sony models which IMO are much better for not much more money stay far away from the cheaper Sony's like the icd-b300/b400/b600 (are identical except for amount of record time) because their SQ in it's best mode produces a ton a hiss and this Oylmpus does put THOSE recorders to shame.

Comment: This recorder was an excellent idea. It's really sensitive and can pick up sounds from across huge distances, and with so much memory I don't have to worry about it cutting off. Playback was crystal clear.

My problem: It's easy to record over things. I did that a couple of times during an interview, when I thought I had just paused the recording. The folder system's a bit confusing. But that could just be me being dumb.

Also, I never tried to upload my files to a computer. For my purposes, I never needed to. So I can't comment on the ease or difficulty of that.

Comment: I like the recorder very much. The only thing I don't like is it doesn't have a volume control for playback,but its so easy to operate especially if you need glasses to see it. You can memorize the main funtion buttons easily without looking at the buttons.