iDictate – Digital Voice Blog

This month we have seen the demise of some digital notetakers from Olympus’ current range. Out go the Olympus WS-550M, VN-5500PC and VN-6800PC. The VN series recorders ends the line of super cheap discount recorders although some will still be available in the short term through national chains like Officeworks, no loss there I was never a fan of these.

The dropping of the WS-550M was a bit of a surprise, traditionally Olympus kept a range of two or three recorders in a series line up, with the loss of the WS-550M this just leaves the WS-450S and the WS-560M as the two remaining WS series recorders. These are fantastic little recorders with amazing audio pickup.

Not content with dropping recorders Olympus also have some new recorders in the pipeline for next month, we are just waiting for confirmation before announcing what they will be. You will be pleasantly surprised, some very cool recorders are coming.

Tweet This Post Delicious

Well they have done it again, Olympus Australia announced on Friday (10th July 2009) that the Olympus WS-311M (512Mb) and WS-321M (1Gb) digital notetakers were now discontinued in Australia. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, not so much the WS-321M as being a middle model (sandwiched beween the WS-311M and WS-331M) they very rarely get sold, but the WS-311M was a very popular choice at Dictate Australia.

When you compare them, there were only a few minor differences between the Olympus WS-311M and the Olympus WS-210S. Apart from being different colours, the WS-311M had it’s record button on the side, mimicking the digital dictaphones, as well as an additional stop and play button on the side, the WS-210S only has buttons on the front panel.

The WS-331M and WS-321M also had noise cancellation which was available via the DSS Player software, the WS-210S does not.

There was also a very slight difference in max. record times, this was due to a slightly higher frequency response used by the WS-311M/WS-321M recorders, not enough to be noticeable.

The WS-311M/WS-321M could also direct record to a Windows PC hard drive instead of the onboard memory using the supplied software.

The WS-311M was one of my personal favourite recorders and will be sadly missed, if you can sadly miss a digital voice recorder!

Usually we have an inkling that something is likely to change. We keep a very close eye on the Olympus America and Olympus Europe websites and quite often we can see up-and-coming new models. There appears to be no replacement coming for the WS-311M and the WS-321M so I think it is safe to say we are just going to be left with the WS 210S and a very classy looking piano black Olympus WS-331M in the small digital notetaker class.

This blog post was written using MacSpeech Dictate – Voice Recognition of Intel Mac

Tweet This Post Delicious