Olympus VN-4100 Digital Voice Recorder: Petite, Technological Blessing

The hard drive in my own brain contains about all it can hold. Filled with childhood memories, TV commercials, education - both the kind sought and pursued intentionally and the other kind - and the random spam that fills our sensory preceptors on a daily basis, it is about full and pretty fragmented at that. I needed help and have found it with the Olympus VN-4100 Digital Voice Recorder.

For many years, I have owned many different battery powered mini-cassette recorders to help me out. I keep one in the car for thoughts that strike me when I am on the road and another at my desk. I lightly referred to these little hand held recorders as my 'adjunct memory.' But, as inexpensive and easy to use as they are, they have some common failings and limitations.

Two of the most significant limitations have been 1) the limitations of the length of the tape and the need to turn it over to get the other half of it's capacity (max of two hours on one tape) and more importantly, 2) the fact that once something is dictated into it, it is difficult to return to it or to erase one small piece of data, leaving the rest intact. Both of these shortcomings are wonderfully solved by the technology of the Olympus VN-4100 Digital Voice Recorder. The decrease in bulk and increase in memory capacity are welcome advances.

This Olympus VN-4100 is about half the size and a third of the weight of the Sony hand held micro-cassette recorders I have been using. It is a slight 2.2oz and measures only .8 X 4 X 1.5in. Using no tape at all, it records onto an internal 256MB Flash Memory that is configured into 4 folders holding up to 25 individual files each. Each time you record a thought, idea or conversation, it is remembered in a separate file. Therefore, it is possible to listen to, use and erase or save individual entries without rewinding and searching for the exact right place on a tape! Erasing one piece of recording leaves everything else entirely as originally recorded.

Files can easily be moved from one folder to another and erasure is a simple and quick process allowing for great selectivity of what, exactly, is to be erased and what is to be left alone.