Olympus WS-500 Digital Voice Recorder (Blue)

I bought this as a backup to my other Olympus recorder (which I frequently lend out). My other recorder is an Olympus WS-100 which I bought 4 years ago. It was one of the first digital voice recorders ever made. It has served me well.

This unit contains a number of improvements over the WS-100 and the WS-400.

When I bought this, I was afraid I would have to carry around a USB cable with me. However, this unit has a little slide button on the side which extends a built-in USB connector. Plugging this into a USB port is a snap.

This unit is a little more compact than the WS-100. It also seems to solve the record delay which was a time vampire on the WS-400. This unit starts to record almost immediately on pressing the record button.

I would give this unit five stars except except the menu is almost indecipherable without spending an entire day memorizing and studying it. This means that you pretty much have to have the manual...Read more

This thing is tiny! the screen is an inch wide, and even though the buttons are small, they are not hard to use. A firmware update allows it to record in mp3 format. Sound quality is excellent, I spoke in a normal, close-conversation voice, from 30 feet away in large room - it was quiet, but very audible. Unlike the other reviewer said, it DOES display "full battery" when done charging.

It has stereo sound level indicators during recording. Built in speaker is paltry, listening on a headphone or external speaker gives the real quality. The menu system is totally fine, not confusing, thing are organized in a hierarchy format. The adjustable-level VOR (called VCVA) works VERY well. Recording in conf mode in either WMA ST XQ or MP3 128 makes crisp, highly sensitive recordings.

This recorder is full-featured and as an audio engineer, I'm impressed!

First of all, I bought this for my husband who is a drummer and a vocalist. He wanted a recorder of some kind to do karaoke music recorded with his voice. I had no idea about any of these recorders, so I started doing research. The Olympus brand seemed to have the better reviews. But none of the recorder reviews were great. Well, I finally decided on this WS-500 DVR. Well, I'm glad that I did because my husband took this and figured everything out by himself. This astounded me becuse my husband is not a technology person. He doesn't even want to know anything about technology. He has never been on my computer, programmed any of our DVRs, VCR's, etc. But you get my meaning. But the biggest surprise was the sound of this recorder. He recorded 4 songs. I uploaded them onto my computer (Just slid the lever on the recorder and pushed it into the USB on my computer to upload) I ripped it on WMP and then burned the songs to a CD. I was able to adjust the sound with the equalizer and it...Read more