Olympus VN-480 Voice Recorder Review - The Speaker
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The back of the unit simply features the speaker and the battery compartment.
For its small size the speaker actually puts out a decent amount of sound while managing not to sound too tinny. Of course in order to have anything to play out of the speaker you'll have to learn what all the buttons do. I love things with lots of buttons, but sometimes a simple and intuitive layout can be very beneficial, and that ends up being the case with the Olympus VN-480.
The display button changes what is displayed at the bottom of the LCD screen, whether that is the date, time of day, or recording time remaining before filling the memory. The record button does what you would expect it to. Also, directly above the display button there is a small LED which turns either red or green depending on the function being accessed.
The enter/index button is of course dual function with one of those functions being simply an "enter" or "select" button. Pressing it while recording, however, will set an index point for easy reference in much the way chapter or scene selection works on DVD players. Utilizing this during a rather long recording such as a lecture could be invaluable in helping you to quickly navigate the high points of said lecture as opposed to listening to the whole thing needlessly. You can set up to ten index points in each file, and they can later be erased one by one if necessary by simply pressing the erase button while the index is occurring during playback.
The buttons on the center circle are pretty self-explanatory. One thing that I found a bit odd was that when setting the clock or timer, the forward and back buttons shown in the center of the layout will move you from setting the hour to the minute and vice versa as well as moving you from day to month to year when setting the date. This seems a bit contradictory to the "plus" and "minus" symbols next to them, when in fact the play and stop buttons actually make the numbers increase or decrease. The reason for this, though, is that when navigating through your various recordings they are simply labeled with numbers, so using the forward and back buttons will take you up and down through the recordings, respectively. A minor issue to be sure, but one worth mentioning since everything else seems quite intuitive.
The erase button does what it says, though you are given a yes or no prompt after pressing it to ensure no accidental deletions occur. The final button is the menu/folder button. Pressing this button quickly will change the folder where the next recording will end up. The device holds four folders. You can't change the folder mid-recording, which helps to keep you from misplacing an important audio file. If that does occur, however, you can move files from one folder to another by simply playing the file, pressing and holding the folder button during playback, and then selecting the correct folder.
Except for the menu button feature, which I'll explain on the next page, I guess that's about it for the buttons...oh that's right, they forgot to put an "OFF" button on this thing. It does have an automatic power saver mode but that doesn't kick on (or should I say off) for five minutes. The very least they could have done was allow you to adjust the power off timer in the menu.
Next: Hearing it in Action >>
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