Gadgets to record the sound of your voice have come a long way since the dictation machines of old.

Many digital voice recorders now offer the chance to store recordings as computer voice files, use software to transcribe the recordings into text in a word processor and play back speech with crystal-clear quality, albeit at a far higher cost.

Olympus, with its experience in voice recorders, hopes its DS-330 can do this at a palatable price.

Cheap, cassette-based voice recorders have their place but tape recordings cannot be shared, emailed or edited. They sometimes can't even be heard if there is background noise.

Cheap, digital equivalents now sound much better but don't connect to PCs, while those that do are too pricey for most.

The Olympus DS-330 is a clever compromise. It has an adjustable noise-cancellation feature to remove background sounds, a docking station to connect to a PC via USB and some good software for transferring between recorder and PC.

At roughly half the size and weight of a mobile phone, the DS-330 is very small but its 16MB of memory stores nearly three hours of audio or five-and-a-half hours on the lower-quality, long-play setting.

Making memos or messages and editing them is easy with this machine and it includes five folders to store them.

Inserting sentences and making changes to dictated notes is equally simple and whatever recordings you make, the playback quality is excellent - you can hear recorded voices more clearly than you ever do when using the telephone.

There are the usual note alarm, index, auto recording and microphone adjustments. The software quickly turns the recordings into WAV files, so you can email memos or add voiceovers to music or video.

If you already have IBM's ViaVoice recognition software, you can even edit your spoken words with ease.

While £170 is a lot for a dictation machine, the DS-330 is a lot more than that. If you need a high-quality voice recorder, it's a great choice at a lower price than other PC-compatible rivals.

DETAILS
Price: £170

Contact: Olympus 0800 072 0070
www.olympus.co.uk