This will be a day of mixed emotions for me, as I have stated before in my ramblings the DM-450 was easily my favourite recorders ever. Ease of use, audio quality, speed of startup, feature packed and of course a great looking recorder made this an awesome recorder, sadly replaced along with the DM-550 (its bigger, beefier, PCM brother) by the DM-3. The DM-3 will join the already available DM-5 as the sole representatives of the DM range in Australia.

We hope to get our first DM-3 early next week and will follow that up with some testing and a full blog review and some up close pictures for your viewing and reading pleasure.

So long DM-450, my friend !

Olympus have just announced that the Olympus DM-3 digital voice recorder will soon be available in Australia (mid 2011) and will replace the hugely popular DM-450 and DM-550 recorders.

The DM-450 has to be my all time favourite Olympus recorder and I use my demo DM-450 all the time so I will be sad to see the end of the DM-450 and DM-550. But, the DM-3 will join the bigger beefier DM-5 which has been out in Australia for a while taking over as the sole representatives of the DM series recorders down under.

So what does the DM-3 have?

Well 4Gb of in-built memory which gives oodles of recording time, but if you can talk the hind legs off a donkey there is an expansion slot to add even more memory and hence recording time (if 24.5 continuous hours of high quality 320 kbps MP3 recording is not enough). Remember these recorders are USB 2 devices and can be used for file/photo/video storage also.

BIG colour display, just like the DM-5 the DM-3 has the stunningly gorgeous large colour screen so easy to see what is going on. The record level meters in particular look fantastic on this display.

Like all Olympus recorders it’s both Mac and PC compatible and comes with Olympus Euphony software to edit your audio.

Expected to arrive in June 2011 price to be advised as and when we know. If you want to grab a DM-450 or DM-550 buy one now before they disappear.