A while ago I was bemoaning the lack of medium quality digital recorder devices (everyone concentrating on players instead). The Podcasting News site has a mouth watering description of three new recorder models from Olympus: DS-30, DS-40 and DS-50. What I think is important here is the conjunction of quality recording bitrates with affordability. I’ve read a few other pioneering podcasting projects that used ‘ordinary’ Olympus dictation devices as a prototypes in organisation-wide podcasting systems but they all agreed that although they were affordable and simple to use the low audio quality was the weak point. These new models could make Olympus a serious player, or is that recorder in the entry-level podcaster market. Something newbies find is that they buy expensive microphones/mixers and connect them to their computer but forget that they have a noisy machine so are forever trying to post-process the sound to remove fan/central heating/air conditioning noises in the fixed location. Having a cheap but good quality recording device that could be used in a more acoustically friendly environment or outdoors for vox pops/sound seeing tours could make a big difference. It’s maybe a small market right now, but over the last couple of years there’s not been much competition from hardware companies competing with new products.
Olympus Intros Three Digital Recorders for Podcasting
Reading the description is sounds like Olympus has been listening (ha!) hard to the wish lists from podcasters and at long enabling visually impaired users to have a non-visual way of operating the device (almost all rely on cryptic, inaccessible menuing systems). Folk like Shelly have been lobbying long and hard to get the likes of Apple to improve the accessibility of iTunes and iPods but with little result. Olympus seem like they’re moving in the right direction.
