Olympus Voice Recorder Vn 240 Pc By EricBauman on Oct 23, 2007 - Updated Oct 15, 2011

The VN-240PC by Olympus is out on the market for quite some time now, but it's still one of the best cheap memo recorders out there. Being one of the cheapest digital memo recorders, it's a nice step up for someone looking to replace their old (and often quite big) tape based recorder. I had used a recorder using tapes before, and using a digital recorder is so much easier. No more changing tapes, rewinding and all of that. With this recorder you can just skip ahead to the chapter you need to listen to and skip to the timestamp you need.

A handy feature when typing out interviews (or anything else you've recorded) is the slow down option. This will slow down everything you hear to a pace that's quite possible to follow while typing. The battery life is great and I can't remember ever changing the batteries in it.

One thing that's not quite right in my opinion is the functions the different buttons represent, but that something anyone can get over with just a few hours of using it. For instance, the play button does not pause, that's done by the stop button, which when pressed again will bring you back to the main screen.

Using this recorder may require some practice, but when you finally get the hang of it, it really works great.