Olympus DS330 Digital Voice Recorder

I've owned this product for a fair while now, and had nothing but good things to say about it, UNTIL I upgraded my PC to Vista.

I discovered that the software CD provided with the unit doesn't work effectively on Vista, and when I contacted Olympus, via olympusvoice.com.au I was told the following:
"The version of software you are using is not Vista compatible. We can supply you with the release 7 version for $94 including gst."

Now given that I already own the software for a previous release, and that the price quoted is at least 1/3rd of what I paid for the unit to begin with, I'd suggest it's a bad deal.

If anyone is looking at this unit, suggest you check first that the software is compatible with your machine. If you're looking at upgrading your machine, BEWARE you don't fall into the same trap that I did - obviously I feel that Olympus' customer service leaves a lot to be desired.

With so many reviews already available here, let me avoid going over the same ground. This is a great instrument with one serious annoyance. I use it in taking biological research notes in the field, and for trail notes when hiking and backpacking. The annoyance is having the STOP button immediately below the PLAY button. Despite years of use now, I still manage to press the latter when trying to end a recording. So then what I've been recording is "rewound" and I have to mess with fast forward to find the place I left off. This is a serious enough problem for an "all thumbs" person such as I that if a new model appears avoiding this problem, I'll buy it and give this one away.

As a professional translator who dictates 6,000 to 10,000 words per day, I rely very heavily on my digital recorder. Because the DS330 is hard to find in a local store, when mine broke I tried others. After trying about 7 other recorders, I got online and bought another DS330.

The reasons why I like the DS300 are the following:
1. Ergonomics. The operability of the unit is superb in how well it fits the way I use it. (The other units I have tried do not support the way I work, which involves a great deal of starting, stopping, and jumping back by a few seconds).
2. DSS sound file format is compatible with the Olympus transcription software, which offers variable speed (50%-200%) playback with auto-jumpback functions, etc. (I have not found good transcription-support software for WAV or MP3 files, or other file formats.) The variable speed playback is also useful when I am reviewing machine transcriptions, where I listen at 200% speed to check for errors in machine transcriptions.
3. Sound quality. Wonderful! The sound quality is good enough (when used with my AT&T noise cancelling microphone) that I can run the results through Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.0 and get high quality machine-transcribed documents (with transcription quality just as high as when I dictate directly to my computer).

The only downside is that I have worn out several of the units -- but that is likely because I have used them outside in snow storms, rain storms, etc. I make sure that I have a spare -- and will be very sad when Olympus finally retires the 330...

I wanted to write this review to clarify something, someone else had written; that this doesn't work for a Mac. Maybe the drivers changed since the last review by a Mac user (I hope they have seeing that the last review was 10/03). I haven't had any problems getting this to work on my computer, witht he drivers provided on the install disc. I am running on a Dual 2 GhZ G5, with Mac OS 10.4.3

I got this a few weeks ago, and since then it has worked beautifully. The recording works easy. Very intuitive. The recordings sound-wise are decent. Plugging in the recorder to my computer, and downloading the audio files, could not be any easier.

I would strongly recommend this recorder.

I'm an internal affairs investigator. The quality of sound on this is really quite incredible. I love that you can plug it into my computer and use it that way, without using any of the batteries, either. The only bad part is that it sounds like everyone has a slight lisp, but it is a minor annoyance. This is the only approved recorder for the state agency that I work for. I would recommend it.