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Olympus DS-40 Digital Voice Recorder
$209.99
I've owned the DS-30 for a couple of years now, and I use it all the time, for taking dictation, recording my talks and interviews, and most recently, to record pieces for podcast. I bought the Olympus digital transcriber at the same time, and my admin asst. raves about how much easier it is to transcribe my notes.

Previously I used microcassette recorders and transcriber and the DS-30 is so much better I just no longer use them.

Sound quality is great for voice. The mikes are very sensitive. I bought the external mike, but the twin (stereo) internal mikes are so good, I rarely use the external. When recording my lectures, I can easily capture the question from the soft-voiced woman in the rear of the room.

There are a few drawbacks:

-- It's very tricky to "rewind" a few seconds and re-record a piece. You're much more likely to jump it back to the beginning of your recording.

-- "Erase" is very unforgiving. There's no "Undo." I learned this the hard way, and now make sure I immediately transfer all recordings to the computer before doing anything else to them.

-- Even though I carefully erase all files (and delete and empty the trash) after I transfer them to my computer, the memory still fills up over time, and there's seemingly no way to clear it except to reset the entire device, which wipes out all settings.

-- Olympus tech support is virtually impossible to reach. It's apparent they don't want to talk to customers. But the one time I did fight my way through their maze, I received very good help.

Olympus tells you it doesn't mesh with a Mac, but it does with no trouble. I downloaded "Flip4Mac" which is either free or very cheap, and it opens your recordings as .wmv files.

Far as I can tell, the only difference between DS-30 and 40 is memory capacity, so this review works for DS-40 as well.

Despite these drawbacks, I still rate it 5 stars, because the good features are SO good.