Olympus VN-5500PC Digital Voice Recorder

Posted by Notcot on Mar 30, 2010 in Portable Sound & Vision |

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5 Comments

AwakeNow.co.uk
at 2:48 pm

I’ve had my Olympus VN-5500PC Digital Voice Recorder (DVR) for two weeks and am well pleased with it. It is simple with a good sized screen and i am more than happy with my purchase.

It records well – about 34hours on high quality and has 5 folder settings. Everything is built in and you can buy an external mic and earphones if you need to. The USB cable connecting the DVR to your computer is the shortest USB cable ever!

The product comes with a basic start up guide, but if you plu the DVR into your computer you have a more detailed instruction manual in a PDF format in numerious languages.

Batteries come with the product and last really well – a battery meter is on the DVR, but i have lost no bars in my hours of use. Clever saftey feature to prevent actual deleting of voice files, but you have to also be careful not to delete all your voice files in one go!

Great basic product which functions very well and serves it purpose.
Rating: 5 / 5


 
N. Sadler
at 5:03 pm

I read some of the reviews before I bought this product and was a bit hesitant because of the some of the negative response but I have to say that this was well worth it. I have conducted face to face and telephone interviews with it and it was not a problem. Picked up sound very well even when I was far apart from the person I was interviewing. It contains an integrated mic and speaker so there is no need to buy any further attachments. Sound it good but what is so great about it is that you can just plug it into your computer and listen to the recording on windows media player, as loud as you want and it is much easier to save the material on your computer. Great improvement from the old days of the tape recorder. Recording is at the touch of a button, erasing is not so easy but I see that as a good thing, I don’t want to accidently delete my recordings. It has a hold button so it does not record whilst its in your bag. It may be small but it does the job well. This was the cheapest I found it and it arrived very quickly.
Rating: 5 / 5


 
Paul Coulter
at 6:59 pm

I was a little bit sceptical before ordering this as not all reviews were entirely positive, but having received it I am truly impressed.

This is a great device – intuitive controls, does everything it should do (even has the handy fucntion of storing in five differetn folders). The sensitivity of the built in microphone seems perfectly adequate and quality fromt he built in speaker is better than I could have expected. When connected to the computer it is easy to use and allows very rapid transfer of files in an easy to use format (instantly recognised by Windows Media Player). It’s also very neat in size and yet with clear labelling and screen display, and it does have a “lock” fucntion to prevent accidental activation in pocket / handbag. In addition, even at high quality it allows over 34 hours of recording.

I simply cannot fault this piece of equipment. Well worth it! Well done Olympus (and well done Amazon – it arrived as quickly as always!!!)
Rating: 5 / 5


 
R. Fisher
at 8:48 pm

Just got this and played with it for 20 minutes or so. It seems to do everything well. You set the date and time and it displays the time you made each recording. A tap of the folder button lets you choose which folder A to E to save your next recording in. Tap record and it instantly starts recording. Tap record again to pause recording, and again to resume. Recordings are just numbered, but you can see when each recording was made. Choose a recording by pressing left or right. Tap Play/Ok to play back. Pause by pressing the stop button and resume playback with play. Fast forward and rewind by holding the relevant button. Buttons press easily and there’s no on/off switch but there is a hold switch on the side that disables all the buttons.

There are a couple of settings of interest. Access the menu by pressing and holding the menu button, then it’s just left, right and Play/Ok to navigate. There is a quality setting. I’d leave this on high quality all the time and it says it can fit over 35 hours of recordings in the memory. The other setting is microphone sensitivity. Conference setting records everything in the room — it seems sensitive and clear enough but I haven’t tried testing it in a noisy room. Dictophone setting is less sensitive and also what sounds right when using the Olympus telephone microphone Olympus TP-7 Telephone Pickup Hands-Free Cable.

There don’t seem to be any missing features and the sound quality is pretty good.
Rating: 5 / 5


 
D Deacon
at 9:01 pm

Got this today. Nice and dinky with good sized controls. Has mic and earphone sockets. 512MB is fine. Easy to operate. This is for ideas, a quick way to record song ideas (go into a music shop…), conversations to recall or keep, etc. Great way to add to one’s brain memory. Voice activation is good (you can set sensitivity) as are marker points. You can buy add ons if you like. I like and like it.

The manual is in the recorder’s flash memory; so plug in the supplied USB cable and it’s there – it is not online for some strange reason. As far as I can see, it operates as it says. In playback mode, press and HOLD >>| to FF or |<< to FR; you can see the time elapse +/-. It will stop at any marker points you created. Sound quality is fine. The internal speaker is not the best (it’s of necessity tiny) but it is okay and headphones improve the sound a lot as does listening on a PC. One other point is turn the back where the speaker is to face you during payback since the sound quality improves. Obviously, I have not yet used it a lot but was interested to verify the two main complaints aired here and they don’t stand up – imv… Rating: 4 / 5


 

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