Review on Olympus VN 4100PC Digital Voice Recorder by Sam Sergio

What a great recorder! Incredibly small! The size of a small cell phone! Like the VCR, it has 4 recording modes; XHQ, {best playback and over 11 hours of recording, then HQ with around 24 hours of recording, then SP, 72, and then LP, 144 hours! I think you would use this setting on a slow boat to China! It also has four folders, A, B, C, D, which can contain around 100 individual entries. This means if you are in folder A and press record and talk for 3 minutes, it will be A-1. Pressing record again creates A-2. and so on. When you want to play your recordings, you can view them 1, 2, 3, or click through to 10, 26, or 100! Also, you can use the special {Folder/Index} button to navigate to or select another folder and record and listen to any other topic you mentioned in these three other folders with their 100 input options! I think the number of entries is limited by the time left from XHQ to LP. After playing in XHQ and HQ I haven't even tried SP or LP because XHQ is so much better than HQ that I don't care about the lower quality playback in the SP/LP modes. Also, be aware that in XHQ, with more than 11 hours of recording, which equates to say 11 cassettes or microcassettes, that's A LOT OF PLAYBACK TIME! That's about 2.75 hours per folder, or more than 11 consecutive hours in a folder! OH! my poor ears! Who could endure 24, 72 or 144 hours? The sound quality is very acceptable to me, if not as good as a larger speaker, even a microcassette player, but hey, I knew where to go. But it's pretty good and works well and I have no problem understanding what's being played! I tried it at 16ft, spoke in a normal tone and was able to understand every word spoken without straining to listen! But the room was calm and quiet. Usually a person just holds it in their hand like any other portable recorder, right? This model, the VN 4100PC, has software and you can load all your "tapes" onto your hard drive. Note that in XHQ, a 2 or 3 minute entry can take up 1.5MB. So an hour can be 45MB? You'll need a LARGE hard drive if you're going to upload your conversation with Goddard! But you can edit if you have time. Playback with my small Dell speakers on my XP PRO was very impressive when playing wav with OLYMPUS software! It sounds really great! Again. What really caught my attention is HOW SMALL this pup is! It needs to be three times smaller than my tape recorder and I don't hesitate to carry it with me most of the time! But I'm not going to record for hours on this or my PC. I use it to capture meaningful statements I make after enlightening moments of clarity! They're pretty small haha so I'd have to get a revelation from the top of the mountain at eleven to use all the time up! Very satisfied and the price is very good!