Customer Reviews

Olympus VN4100 Digital Voice Recorder

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(27)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I've had the recorder for about a month and am very pleased with it. I've dropped it a few times and it's still working as it should. (After I dropped it the third time, I bought a neck strap so that I can now easily use it when driving, walking, etc.) I use it only for making mental notes/reminders. I have not used it to record lectures, etc. I use it about 15-30 minutes a day and the battery is still strong. I set up my four folders as follows: a: urgent/to be done today. b: To do (personal) c: To do (work); d; Tech stuff. The only thing I do not like is the color.

TIP: When making a list of items, record each item individually. You can then delete the item once it's been taken care of instead of having to listen to it over and over again until the complete list has been taken care of.

Sometimes I think people buy a bike and think they'll get a Ferrari instead. This little Olympus recorder is an outstanding machine for what it was intended to do; take notes. After reading some of the reviews, I'm thinking that some folks were expecting to receive a Zoom H4 digital field recorder. No, no, no! The Zoom H4 is a phenomenal mini-recording studio for $300.00.

This VN4100PC was about $30.00 delivered. If I need high quality audio, I use it at its highest sampling rate, then goose it a little after transferring it to my computer. It sounds just fine.

If you plan on doing some transfering to your PC, be sure you buy the VN4100PC not the VN4100.

The product is light-weight and functional. Basically, there are four main folders to pick from, A-D, and within each of these, every recording is sequentially numbered 1 - 100. My one complaint is that you can't continue a recording on, say, B-1 once the Stop Recording button has been hit. You can Pause the recording, but once it's Stopped, the next time you push Record within the B folder, it will register as B-2. ...Doesn't sound like such a big deal, but when you go back to listen to all of folder B, you have to hit PLAY for each numbered file. In other words, I have to hit the PLAY button 14 times to listen to B1- B14. I'm using "B" as my to-do list, so one can imagine that I'm always adding to it throughout the day, and listening to it becomes a pain in the neck. This is a pretty basic model, so maybe this issue is handled better in the more upscale models.

I needed a nice, simple recorder that I could use to dictate reports, for e-mailing to my transcriptionist. This unit is very compact and only weighs a few ounces. Sound quality is clear. Recording is easy -- press the record button to start recording, press the same button to pause or resume, press stop when you're done. You can't back up while recording and re-record when you misspeak, and you can't append to an existing file. These are distinct disadvantages, compared to other machines that I've used for transcription, but not fatal flaws. Overall a good and useful machine.

I use this to record seminar speakers. Often the sessions I attend are delivered at a fast pace and this makes my note taking much easier. I simply start the recording and the then notate the time stamps on the handouts. In this fashion I can fast forward to the relevant material and listen again at a later time. The quality is very good, I use HQ/High which is NOT the highest setting in order to avoid extraneous noises, such as when I move the recorder. I do wish the display had a back light for dark rooms though.

The one flaw is the PC interface which was poorly thought out. I would have preferred for it to emulate a hard disk and allow me to simply plug in to its USB interface and copy the files off.

Instead you MUST use their application to offload your wav clips. Now say you have made one recording per session (or class) and you have 12 recording to transfer. These are not time stamped in the file name or windows metadata (i.e. you can't right click and select properties to see what date/time it was recorded.) Instead the files are names DW_<folder_letter><sequence_number>. It will tell you that you have so many files to copy, in my example 12, but it wont let you select an individual file. Instead you have to copy all of them.

Now this will take some time so you go get a coke and come back. Now and look for a status line or progress bar. Nada. It will tell you how far you are in transferring the current file but not how many files it's processed or has left. The upper display panel of their GUI will not show the list of transferred files till all are transferred.

Furthermore the application is locked till the transfer is complete preventing you from post processing the already transferred files. The files can be accessed from the Windows Explorer interface prior to finishing the transfer but this is clumsy at best.

It will also not alert you if there is not enough room to copy the files over from the recorder to your hard disk, so if your low on disk space - watch out.

Renaming files within their GUI can be done but normal Fn sequences like F2 for Edit do not work. If you make the mistake of playing a file to verify its contents before renaming it you can't rename it because the file is locked by its player, even if you clicked stop. The only work around is to select another file first and the go back and reselect the file and rename it.

The help files are laughable incomplete. For example under the heading "Handy Digital Wave Player uses " it reads "Describes handy ways of using Digital Wave Player." Sorry I had to laugh.

At any rate the recorder is of great quality and as other folks have said you can drop it and it will still work. If I couldn't find another one with a better PC interface I wold certainly buy this one again. The sound quality, recording length and build are good.

My husband used his old tape-based voice recorder for years at work to record meetings. When it finally gave up the ghost, I decided to try a digital model in its place.

I was a little worried that my tech-o-phobe husband wouldn't be able to easily figure out the Digital Voice Recorder, but within a few minutes of opening the box, he was recording, erasing and listening to recordings - all without ever looking at the instructions.

The small size and light weight of the recorder make it even easier to carry around than the old tape model. It's slightly smaller than a candybar type phone, and much lighter in weight.

To the casual eye, this will simply appear to be a cell phone. You could easily take it out of a pocket, hit record, and return it to your pocket without anyone thinking twice about it - they'd just think you were turning off the ringer on your cell phone.

In use, the recorder performed flawlessly - in voice activated format, the recorder caught everything with no clipping, and never missed any of the action.

We're very pleased with this purchase!

This little recorder does everything it claims. There seems to be some confusion in other posts regarding pc connectivity. Not sure why this is, these are two separate products and a check would be price at time order is placed. I didn't need that feature. The choice was between the Sony and this one. I opted for the ability to add an index mark. Sony didn't seem to have this, but does permit file split and append to a recording.
With microphone set to low, dictation is clear and background pickup is reduced, can record voice with radio playing. With microphone set high will pick up a whisper. The voice actuation feature works well.
The total recording time in least quality is more than I would ever need, I left it at default setting one down from max. I did test at lower settings and they seem ok for voice at least.

I called Olympus to help me figure out which recorder would suit me best, and this is the one recommended to me. I use it to record piano practices. The sound is as clear or maybe a little clearer than my old Sony tape recorder I used for lectures in school, of course the mic is not very directed; it picks up everything, a/c noise, fans, there is a good bit of static in the upper end. I'm not sure the sound and recording quality is better than than the Olympus model with the mp3 player, but I was told by Olympus rep it's better. Controls are easy to figure out. Haven't used the PC part of it yet, I probably won't so I don't know how that works. I bought mine when Amazon offered it directly, and paid a lot less and got free shipping. I wouldn't recommend it for any type of quality recording, but for school, notes to self, etc it's fine.

Purchase the the VN-5000 if you're considering the VN-4100; it's the 2008 replacement. The VN-5000 is sleeker, has larger memory capacity, and is selling for cheaper than the VN-4100. Recording and playback quality are exceptionally clear. The unit weighs about as much as a Snickers bar. Both models share similar features with the only major differences being the appearance and memory capacity.

This company(Olympus) cheats customers by luring them to believe that VN4100 is the same as VN4100PC.The difference lies in the computer connectivity.This Voice recorder which bears the VN4100 does not have USB Port and thus CANNOT do a file transfer to the computer.So the question of email sending of voice files is impossible.
Also, the battery functionality is not good.The moment the hold button is on and the battery is replaced the machine crashes and becomes useless.
The design is sleek but it has not substance.