On a quiet Tuesday evening, nothing much to do, thought I would do some surfing on the web. Called into one of the most static sites you will find, the Olympus Voice Australia website. Clicked on the what’s new link and boom – DS-3400 Coming Soon !
Why was I surprised by this? Well, apart from the fact that the site rarely changes, with Dictate Australia being one of Olympus’ top online resellers we thought we might have, you know, been told!
Here is some information I have gleaned so far. Nobody seems to know when this is coming to Australia, I would estimate towards the end of Q3 2009, but this is just a guess, nothing official from Olympus Voice as yet.
Pricing is also a guessing game, I have the recorder on my site at an estimated RRP of $540 incl. GST, this is going from the RRP on the Olympus America website. My thoughts are that it will be around the same price as the DS-2300 model which is due to be replaced shortly by the DS-2400. Time will tell and there will be updates here as soon as I know.
A quick skim through the specs the things that jump out at me are: there is no cradle as there is no power option, this one runs on batteries only. As is the trend at Olympus this will record in the DS2 (DSS Pro) format although the recorder comes with DSS Pro software so “classic mode” may be available. There is no slider on the side like the DS-5000, instead there are push buttons, similar to the old DS-3300.
More news as and when it comes from Olympus on the new digital dictaphone …