Olympus Pearlcorder J300 (3 Hours) Handheld Cassette Voice Recorder

We bought this little recorder for our son who's 9 to use in school as he has problems with hand writing. He used it daily to record book reports or other written assignments, then I scribe them out for him. His teacher had control of it so it didn't become a toy nor was it mis handled.

At first, it was running just fine. It was light and easy for him to use and he really enjoyed the voice activated feature so he didn't have to push buttons all the time. But about two months after we bought it (January '04), it just stayed on. That is, unless we removed the batteries, it hissed with the air sound, like it's still on. We tried everything to get it to stop but it still wouldn't shut off. It's rather annoying and takes about 24 to 30 hours to kill the batteries if they are left in with the door closed. So it became a use at home only recorder. My son would loose the batteries or forget to take them out at school and it was starting to be a problem.

This past December, We needed to start applying pressure to the door of the tape compartment in order for the tape to run. As far as I know, it hasn't been dropped or abused in any way. Maybe we just got a dud model, but after paying over $35.00 for it I wasn't impressed with the durability for being less than a year old.

Using it to scribe from is not bad. I use a head set that requires a small adapter when I'm transcribing. It does has a lot of background air that can get annoying but I guess that's to be expected from such a small device. I enjoy the pause switch and the ease in which I can rewind with the slider button as my son talks pretty fast.


We haven't used it for anything other than hand held voice recording for short periods so I can't speak to overall recording quality of lectures or use of the external microphone option.