After years of using micro-cassette recorder, a tool which has become indispensable in my line of job, I finally decided that I had had enough of it. So I went to Lucky Plaza in Singapore — I’m not a Singaporean but I’m working in Singapore — and window-shopped for a digital voice recorder.
I was not sure which brand to go for but I was determined to get the best deal out of the SGD150 in my pocket. To cut the story short, I settled for a sleek-looking voice recorder from an unlikely brand — Olympus VN-2100PC. I thought of Olympus only in terms of its super-zoom digital cameras such as the 18x optical zoom Olympus 550-UZ.
With the VN-2100PC, you can do over 35 hours of continuous voice recording, but that’s for the lowest sound quality setting. For the extra high quality (XHQ) audio input and output, you can only record for 2 hours and 55 minutes.
I use mostly the HQ (high quality) setting which give me 5 hours and 50 minutes of continuous recording. The sound quality is almost as good the XHQ and perhaps slightly better than the sound quality of my old micro-cassette recorder.
Other features: large LCD, intuitive menu, timer recording, three playback options — normal, slow, fast as well as four recording folders capable of storing up to 100 recordings each. Transferring the audio file to PC is easy enough via a USB 2.0 cable and an easy to manage interface.
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