Product Description: A sleek, pocket-sized voice recorder, the VN-5000 is perfect for people who want to record interviews, lectures and conversations. Its intuitive thumb pad controls make it easy to record, index and manage your files. Plus, it offers 300 hours of continuous recording time - so you won't have to cut anyone short.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - Voice Recorder
Very nice and compact design. Recorded sound is very clear. Easy to use and I would recommend this item.
Rating: - Olympus VN-5000 Digital Voice Recorder
This little voice recorder is exactly what I needed. It isn't fancy, but for the money, it is perfect. The playback is very clear and it is very easy to use. I would definitely recommend this product.
Rating: - Amazing tool for implementing a GTD system
It's the first recording device I ever owned and I'm extremely happy with this purchase.
WHY BUY SUCH A THING:
1. if you have watched THE SIXTH SENSE, you should have remembered that Dr.
Malcolm Crowe used such a device to record down any thoughts he had after he met
his patients. IMHO, since most of my inventive ideas pop into my mind when it's most
inconvenient for me to take notes of such fleeting thoughts, a recorder is by
far the best device for taking them down. Even if most cellphones nowadays have some
functionality similar to a recorder, their performance and usability are much
worse.
2. David Allen's masterpiece about time management, Getting things done, also
recommends various kinds of in-boxes to store all the internal commitments you
may have anytime and anywhere, and a recorder is much easier to carry with you
than paper and pen and to use in various places out of office.
PROS:
+++ VCVA: this is a killing feature! it will only be recording when there is
sound louder than the threshold you set, so all silences in lectures, meetings
and dictations when you are thinking will not appear in the recordings! REALLY
GREAT FEATURE!
+ can be a good toy for children; help them musing over various sounds in Nature
++ amazing battery life: though I didn't use it intensively, that the included
batteries still being indicated as 'FULL' after 4 month of using, is extremely
satisfacory.
++ easy management of recordings: there is A, B, C, D, 4 folders for storing
different kinds of notes, and I found this very useful. I use A as an in-box for
my GTD system, B to store memorable quotes and sayings I encountered when
reading books, C and D for storing any thougths coming into my mind when I brainstorm
about a project.
+ LED indication of recording status:
CONS:
- no appending/inserting: recordings cannot be edited later. But I think it's
not a big problem since nobody is going to use it record an album.
- no connection to computers (for models without suffix of PC in their model
names): I don't care about the absence of this feature, since I only use it to
temporarily store things that I would never want to preserve for later use. If
some students want to use this to record lectures, they may want to buy models
that have a PC/Mac connection interface.
CONCLUSION:
A must buy for any intellectual worker. I would recommend this to
anybody!
Rating: - Good Product Design
This digital voice recorder has a good design and easy to use. I found it very simple and did exactly what I wanted it to do. I record different stuff for my website [...] The only drawback is that the built in speaker is not very loud and and the batteries that came with it were weak. I gave this five stars because if you use earphones you can hear it as loud as you want. It was worth the money I paid.
Rating: - No bells and whistles, but who needs them
Back to basics. This Olympus DVR works just fine for recording mock therapy sessions in my psychology class. It's easy to use. The sound reproduction is clear. It has a long battery life.
I'm not a technie or a teenager. So navigating digital equipment isn't organic to me. I need instructions. The more cookbook-like, the better. Before I bought this model, I considered purchasing a similarly priced Sony model because after all I had a number of other Sony products in my audio visual stable. But, eek, reviews of Sony's murky instructions scared me off. The Olympus instructions sheet isn't the best--pictures instead of words. But when I got stuck, I called the Olympus toll-free line, and got through right away to a friendly customer service rep, who easily resolved my issue.
One nit: The "Hold" button is really the on/off switch. I'm not sure why Olympus doesn't call it like it is.
And a caveat: You can't transfer recordings from this DVR directly into a computer. You'll have a pay more to get this feature.
- Voice Recorder
