Is it acceptable to say something along the lines of "this microphone is out of the 122 series" instead of "this microphone is from the 122 series" ?
I have a colleague who insists that using 'out of' in this way is British English. I have never heard it used like that before.
edit:
I asked him if he had any examples, and he said that if you type something to the effect of 'characters out of . . ." in Google, it will come up with many examples. Google suggests "characters out of the Lion King" right away, for instance, which would suggest this usage is popular.
Does it work for talking about products from a specific series though? (We are copy translators for the British market, which is why I'm even bothering to nit-pick)
Best Answer
In terms of casual usage both "from" and "out of" are equivalent, and it's easy to find lots of examples using "[singular item] out of [collection]".
For technical writing though; the phrase "out of the series" does require contextual clues to identify whether the writer is intending to say "[singular item] is within the scope of this series" or "[singular item] is outside the scope of this series".
Since a goal of technical writing is high clarity, a better solution might be to state "this microphone is in the 122 series" which expresses both "originates with this series" and "currently exists within this series" without ambiguity.
(Conceptually even 'from this series' can be interpreted incorrectly by non-native speakers, since an extremely literal definition of 'from' means removal or transportation out of something.)