Ahab1973's Full Review: SanDisk Sansa e260 (4 GB) MP3 Player
UPDATE June 24 2008 - My initial review of this player was quite positive.
However, after I'd owned it for a while, I plugged in the cable one day and Windows informed me that it was unable to connect to the device.
I tried everything that I could think of and everything everyone online recommended. Nothing worked.
The player still works and charges but I can't place any new music on it or remove any. I'm simply stuck with what I had on there when this happened.
Hopefully, my case is an isolated event. But it probably isn't. I have taken off an additional star, leaving it with 3 stars. This is because I'm not entirely positive that it's a manufacturing defect. I do not believe I have done anything that would cause this but I guess you never know. It's enough for me to say I don't recommend Sandisk MP3 players, however.END UPDATE June 2008
Revised and (hopefully) final review - Fair warning. This review is very lengthy. However, I think I've done a good job of writing about some things other reviewers don't. If you get bored reading it and you just want a summary, the last few paragraphs should be sufficient.
Introduction - (Scroll down to "Out Of The Box (Finally) And First Impressions" if you don't want to read about me)
When I was in my mid-teens, my old Sony cassette Walkman (which I still have over 15 years later) was pretty much my constant companion. It had six main features - Play, Fast Forward, Rewind, Stop and Bass Boost.
Surprisingly, I didn't want for anything more back then (except for maybe a more expensive Sony cassette Walkman, of course). I can vividly remember laying awake many nights (when I was supposed to be sleeping for school the next day) listening to my favorite music until I grew tired of those cheapo Sony headphones, with their cheapo, scratchy fabric, rubbing constantly against my ears and not being able to lay on my side.
For all it's flaws and shortcomings, I loved that thing! It was inexpensive, it had good volume and sound quality and not much could go wrong with it that I couldn't fix.
Fast Forward to the present - I'm a moderately tech-savvy guy but I'm not really that interested in anything that's so complicated that it requires extensive reading of the owner's manual just to get up and running. Not to mention learning all of it's advanced features (many of which I just find useless and annoying, anyway). Thus, I managed to resist the recent MP3 player/iPod craze......for a while.
I have a Sony Discman but when I recently decided to try and restore my aging body to a more youthful state in the gym, I quickly realized that the Discman is just far too bulky and requires way too much fiddling around with swapping discs and too much thought and effort put into what I wanted to listen to that day. And then, there was batteries. It wasn't really a battery hog but it was still an issue to be dealt with. And to beat it all, the sound wasn't that great.
I found my resistance to the MP3 demon (Slowly but surely) faltering.
But I'm not a "Pod Person" and I really have no desire to be. I decided that if I was going to break down and buy something, it wasn't going to be white. In spite of the marketing genius of the keepers of the holy flame of podness, the whole "Pod People" thing just creeps me out. If you're even remotely interested in Science Fiction, you probably know precisely what I mean. If you aren't a Science Fiction fan, you're probably one of "them". Get away!
Anyway.....I finally realized the obvious. There was just no longer any denying the allure of having many hours of music in a tiny, sleek device just slightly smaller than my wallet (which is, curiously, a bit larger now). The only thing I could really do to lessen my level of conformity was make sure it wasn't an Apple product.
The Search - So I started my research (I did most of it online). These things are still mindlessly expensive (as is anything that's popular enough to sell itself (even if it's white), I s'pose). I paused briefly to observe and admire the apparent brilliance of the Creative Labs Zen V Plus. But looking around, I saw a lot of very negative reviews of it (reliability-wise).
Now it's important that anyone who is reading this review and considering one of these units is aware of what I was looking for and what I wasn't. I wasn't looking for something that would replace every electronic device I own, do my laundry, prepare my taxes, cook dinner and give me hourly stock updates. I just wanted to listen to music. And I wanted to do it with something small, light, easy to use and as easy on my wallet as possible.
So I was looking for something pretty basic. The last thing I need is another device that is complicated to use or dependent on proprietary software. In short, I wanted something with drag and drop capability. Simplicity personified. I remembered reading that if you get an Ipod, you're basically stuck with Itunes (Although there are probably some unofficial solutions somewhere). I actually like the look of the iPod and do usually prefer a respected and well known name brand. I just don't like to be forced to use proprietary software. And I didn't like the fact that the iPod battery can't be changed by the consumer and, in fact, it's rather expensive ($60, last I heard) to have it replaced. Ridiculous! Hello? It's a freakin' battery! Who designs a battery powered device without thinking about the fact that the battery might need to be replaced within a couple of years? Or, maybe they did? Either way, that was a big negative for the iPod.
Anyway, finally, something that didn't seem to have too many drawbacks caught my eye. The 4 gig Sansa e260 from Sandisk really seemed like a good deal, compared to the device it was obviously intended to compete with - the iPod Nano 4GB. I was kind of wary because as far as I know, Sandisk is more known for memory cards than for MP3 players. But I did a fair amount of research. The Sansa does have it's fair share of negative reviews but there didn't seem to be as many complaints about it as some other iPod alternatives. And many of the complaints I saw didn't involve extremely serious problems. I knew it wasn't going to be perfect and I might have a few kinks to work out but when you pinch pennies, perfection is really an unrealistic expectation.
The Purchase Experience - So, I bought the Sansa and rushed home to play with it.
The plastic outer packaging, naturally, was positively bulletproof. It was simply impossible to open this package with my bare hands......or my hands combined with my teeth (I tried giving it a really dirty look but that didn't work either). I've had enough experience with this stuff to know that when the scissors come out, things are getting serious. I really wonder if people have died trying to open stuff packaged in this fashion. I know I've sliced myself really good at least a couple of times (And subsequently made up new swear words to punctuate the expressions of my extreme displeasure). It just adds insult to injury when you pay over a hundred dollars for something about the size of a credit card and then you have to physically bleed to get it out of the packaging to boot. OK...I didn't actually cut myself (this time) but I could have if I hadn't been aware of the dangers. Does this really need a paragraph dedicated to it? Yes because I'm sick of it. You can't even buy a package of pencils anymore without getting violent with the packaging. It's ridiculous.
Out Of The Box (Finally) And First Impressions - Happily, getting music from your computer onto this little guy isn't a complicated affair at all (assuming you just want the music and nothing fancy like album art or anything). Much easier than getting it out of the box it came in. The simplest way to do it is to connect the USB cable, wait for it to show up on your computer, open the "Music" folder and drag and drop your folders into it. Transfer times are acceptable (A gigabyte takes between 5 and 7 minutes on my system). I think you can let it grab the music itself with WMP or the included Rhapsody software but honestly, I prefer to do this kind of stuff without extra software whenever possible. Again....simplicity is important.
The user interface is pretty simple and easy to navigate but is a little quirky in spots and could be easier to navigate. There doesn't seem to be a simple way to get from the "Now Playing" screen to a list of available music without going through at least 2 menus. It also works in a sequence that seems rather counter-intuitive to me. Perhaps that has been fixed with newer firmware than I have, however. I'm wary of trying to upgrade it since everything works well enough for me and I try to follow the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" philosophy.
Most navigation is accomplished with the scroll wheel (which has a blue ring that glows pretty brightly when it's being used) and the large concave button located at it's center. The wheel also doubles as a volume control when a song is playing and you're on the "Now Playing" screen. Pretty nifty! Only trouble is that if you're in a menu and you want to adjust the volume, you either have to navigate to the Now Playing screen or wait for it to revert back to it on it's own before you can do so.
The photo and video features work. That's about as much as I can confirm, as I haven't evaluated them very extensively. The screen is really too small for videos, in my opinion. My test video (The only one I tried) did play without any obvious problems. However, when I went to delete it from the "Video" folder, it didn't show up there under it's own title and seemed to be (oddly enough) fused with one of the demo videos. I simply deleted that and (fortunately) the test video was deleted as well. Would have kind of sucked if I'd wanted to keep the demo, however.
The included conversion software (That you pretty much have to use if you want to put videos on the player) would not recognize a Divx file that I wanted to convert and try out. There's probably a workaround if you have software to convert Divx to Mpeg or one of the other formats that is recognized but I didn't bother. It takes forever to convert large video files on my computer and It just wasn't worth it to me.
Photos look nice and colorful but they will only display in portrait orientation. It would be kind of nice if there were a few more options for photos. Perhaps a person would prefer to view a Landscape photo without having it scaled down even smaller to fit the 3:4 AR. This doesn't really affect my rating because neither the video or the photo option is important to me. This is an audio player as far as I'm concerned. The photo and video functions are nifty but they'll probably be rarely used by me. If I were rating this player taking the usefulness of the photo and video features into account, I would likely take off another star.
The build - Is quite good. The only issues I really have is that the scroll wheel feels a bit flimsy compared the rest of the device and the other function buttons are mindlessly small and difficult to operate. I realize some sacrifices have to be made to save on bulk but I would certainly live with a little more bulk (it wouldn't take much) for buttons that were easier to use. When I have to stop whatever else I may be doing and use my thumbnail to press a damn button, the quest for ultra miniaturization is getting pretty ridiculous. However, the situation doesn't seem much better on other very small MP3 players. And the players that are larger are usually only larger because they're hard drive-based and they have to be. Designers seem obsessed with form over function design. I didn't want a player with a fragile hard drive. Obviously, Apple's design is a bit more streamlined but it's a little hassle I guess I can live with. I've gotten used to it.
The back of the unit is made of some sort of grayish alloy that looks and feels quite elegant (And durable). The black faceplate is (I think) made of what seems to be a very hard plastic. It doesn't seem extremely prone to scratches (although I have already noticed a couple on mine), provided you wipe fingerprints (which it does attract quite readily) with a soft, clean cloth. It's probably still a good idea to buy one of the optional protective cases, however. They're not expensive. It does come with a very basic soft case but it doesn't have windows for the screen and buttons and the optional ones are much nicer.
This player also has a slot for a memory card so you can add extra capacity. I don't have one of the cards, don't plan to buy one and (obviously) haven't tried it. But it's there if you want it.
I would prefer that the ports for the connector cable and the memory card be protected when not in use with rubber plugs as I've seen on other devices. It's easy for grit, lint and all sorts of other junk to get in there and cause problems.
Otherwise, everything seems just as well made as the competition.
Sound Quality - OK.....this is the big one! This is my first concern with any audio device. I don't care how many fancy options it has or how many functions it serves, if it doesn't sound good, it's worthless.
So, how does the Sansa e260 sound? Happily, I think it is very acceptable, provided you pair it with decent, reasonably sensitive headphones. I'm currently using a set of Sennheiser HD 497s. It has just enough grunt to drive them to a reasonably high volume (probably higher than would be healthy for your hearing for extended periods). You might need a headphone amplifier for anything significantly more power hungry than these Sennheisers. Good headphone amplifiers can run into a lot of money and they can add considerable bulk.
I'm basing this review on music ripped straight from CD to MP3 at 160, 192, 256 and 320 kbps. I use constant bit rate. All sound very good (for MP3). I actually really can't tell the difference between MP3 and CD unless it's a really low bit rate MP3. Of course, I don't have the greatest equipment, either.
The only really bad points on the sound are that if you're using really sensitive headphones, you can sometimes hear some electronic noise made by the system loading the files in between tracks and the output could be more powerful. Sometimes, it sounds a tiny bit thin.
I haven't listened to the competition (Namely, the iPod Nano) but from what I hear (Depending on who you believe) the Nano either sounds slightly worse or slightly better than the Sansa e200 series. I just don't feel that a slight increase in sound quality is worth the significantly higher price (At least $50 in my store) of the 4 GB Nano if you're on a very tight budget.
Obviously, if you want to put a lot of music on here, with only 4 gigs of space, you're going to want to balance bit rate (AKA sound quality) against the extra space higher bit rates require. I generally don't use anything lower than 256 for MP3. Fortunately, my collection isn't that large.
PROS -
* Decent sound quality (Assuming you're willing to spring for better headphones than the ones it comes with).
USB 2.0 Connectivity
* The screen - is very colorful, nice and bright and quite easy to read from straight on or a little to the side. It does fade significantly at extreme angles and would probably be nearly impossible to read outdoors in bright sunlight (like most such screens).
The screen brightness is adjustable and has more than just two or three brightness levels as I've seen on some cell phones. It was easy for me to find just the right brightness. You can also program the length of time you want the screen to stay on after you've made some adjustment or selection (Up to 60 seconds or continuously on). That's probably common but it's still something I appreciate.
* Auto Shutoff - The Sansa will automatically shut down if it is left in the pause mode for a period of time that you select. I chose five minutes when I first got it and haven't moved it since. I really love this feature because I never know when I put the music on pause if I'm coming back right away or not. So I don't have to worry about killing the battery with pause. And when you power it back up, it will resume right where you left it. Nice!
* User replaceable Lithium Ion battery - Honestly, I'm pretty sure any reasonably tech savvy person might be able to replace an iPod battery. However, the iPod likely wasn't designed to be disassembled by the consumer. The Sansa actually was (Tiny screwdriver required). Sandisk actually sells the battery replacement kit on their web site. And you can probably find the battery at Radio Shack if you (like me) hate mail order.
* Charges reasonably fast and battery life is excellent - This, believe it or not, is one thing that can make or break an electronic device for me. I can't stand to wait many hours for something to charge. The Lithium Ion battery in the Sansa will take a full change in 3 hours or so (I haven't actually timed it so I'm not really sure. I usually charge it when I'm sleeping). The battery icon registered half full when I got it and although the instructions tell you to fully charge the battery before using it for the first time, I just couldn't resist playing with it for a few hours. The level on the battery meter didn't even move during this time, which is amazing, considering many fully charged rechargables will die within a week or so if not used. The Sansa reportedly has a 20 hour batter life. I have never times this claim either but it seems to last forever so I'm satisfied. I've been listening to it pretty much all day today (Since about 6 AM and it's now about 6 PM) and the meter still registers half full. Impressive! The battery life is exceptional.
* Sleek and Compact - This is good, but could also be a con if you don't like the trend of impossibly small buttons. The e260 fits easily in a shirt pocket. It does bear a striking resemblance to the iPod Nano. I don't like the small button trend at all but I can deal with it. I usually find what I want to listen to with the wheel and select it with the large button in the center.
* FM tuner - This would be nice for people who listen to the radio a lot. I don't. However, when I tried it, I got nothing but static on the stations I know of in this area. Thus, I must conclude that you need to be outside (or maybe in a tall building) to get good reception. As far as I know, my walls aren't full of metal. You can also, supposedly, record from the radio. Obviously, since I wasn't able to get any reception, I can't comment. A radio should be able to receive a strong signal inside a structure or it's just not worth anything. I'd just as soon the extra effort and circuitry that went into the radio went into making the sound quality/output power better.
*Voice Recording - This is a pretty cool function. It works acceptably. The hole for the microphone is little more than a pinhole so, not surprisingly, the quality isn't great. Still, the quality is perfectly acceptable for voice. It might actually do for lectures, assuming the speaker has a strong voice and doesn't tend to mumble.
*There's a decent range of accessories available for the Sansa. There aren't nearly as many as there are for the iPod, however. I'm basically only interested in an AC adapter/charger and a protective case. I'm not 100% sure they make an external charger exclusively for this unit. Of course, there's a pretty good chance the availability of accessories for these models will be limited within only a couple of years. Sandisk obviously doesn't have the brand recognition that Apple does and probably hasn't sold nearly as many units. Support for the Sansa likely won't be extremely long-term. I could be wrong but that might be a very significant point for some. I don't tend to buy a new expensive device like an MP3 player unless my old one died. I just can't afford it. It is a bit disconcerting to think you might not be able to buy accessories beyond the next year or two. Of particular concern, replacement batteries. It'll likely be a while before the original battery becomes unusable. It's up in the air as to whether this battery will be available two years from now if your Sansa is still around and you just need a battery.
CONS - Well, there are some things about this device that make it obvious where the costs were cut. I'm willing to live with them but some may be more discriminating so I'll mention the ones I've noticed -
:( You cannot browse your music by folders. You can, however, browse by artist, album, genre, etc but the catch is that everything must be tagged correctly or you'll simply have a mess. This really threw me at first and I was supremely confused. I didn't have any experience with MP3 players or this kind of file navigation system. This method of browsing is convenient, however and works well....provided whatever software you use to tag the files does everything exactly right. If not, there's no telling where the files will turn up or under what names.
:( Somewhat Limited Formats - If you like to rip your music to a lossless format, you're out of luck here. I think it will probably play WAV but I haven't tried it (Huge files). When I bought it, I actually assumed it would play WMV Lossless because standard WMV is supported but it doesn't. It's a music player. Why can't it support virtually all common formats? It's just irritating when your favorite format isn't supported. Especially when there's really no good reason why it couldn't be.
:( The supplied "headphones" are just terrible - They sound dull and hollow, aren't very comfortable and their design is extremely basic. They can't even be EQed to sound decent. You could probably buy better "earbuds" than these for $15 at Wal Mart. This really irritates me because this is the Sansa's primary function. It's designed for use almost exclusively through headphones. The very least they could do would be to include decent headphones. If you've been shopping for good headphones lately, you've no doubt noticed that they're neither easy to come by or cheap.
:( The Scroll Wheel - The wheel feels just a bit flimsy and unrefined. It doesn't move smoothly and sticks a little when the player is new (this smooths out a lot with a few days of use, however). As far as I can tell, it only really feels flimsy. I haven't had a problem with it and haven't really heard a lot of complaints about it breaking so it must be more sturdy than it feels.
:( Problems With Playlists - Playlists aren't exactly easy to make with the e200 series as it comes out of the box. You can either add songs one at a time in player or you'll have to use external software, such as Rhapsody. I don't like Rhapsody because it's a Real Player product and I swore off of them long ago. And I'm not even sure you can make playlists for the Sansa with it, as I only briefly installed it and then uninstalled it. I just hated it instantly.
There's at least one freeware solution available exclusively for the e200 series. It can be found on the forums located at the URL below. It's quite good but is a work in progress as I understand. It makes making playlists a snap, however.
There is a wealth of information regarding the Sansa available on these forums. Almost any problem or question you might have has been addressed there. I highly recommend a visit there if you're even considering purchase of a Sansa.
:( One puzzling omission is the lack of an AC adapter/charger. The long battery life is great but the fact that you have to plug this player into a USB port in order to charge it could obviously be a problem if your battery happened to die when you were going to be away from your computer for quite some time and wanted your tunes.
:( An Odd Problem - I've had some minor issues that I can't really explain. A couple of times, whilst listening to a song, the right channel just suddenly cut out for a period of about 30 seconds. All that could be heard was the left channel. If I started that song over, the same thing would happen at exactly the same point in time. I was perplexed because I personally ripped that music and it wasn't there on the PC. However, cycling the power on and off seemed to fix the problem in both cases.
UPDATE - OK...I was reading the forum mentioned earlier in the review and it seems the problem with one channel cutting out periodically is quite common with the e200 series. It's apparently a bug in the firmware. Basically, it seems to be a problem with the custom equalizer setting. As long as you use the Sansa on the "Normal" setting or one of the other presets, the problem doesn't appear. It only seems to occur when the custom EQ is in use and when the EQ levels are radically altered.
Fortunately, you can still use the "Custom" EQ setting as long as you keep the levels (particularly the lowest bass) relatively low. Going into the upper ranges with the bass is where I had the most problems. Not really a big problem as radical EQing just adds a ton of distortion anyway. Still, this is disappointing. I would expect something that simple to be fixed long ago. It's hard to believe such a common issue wouldn't be addressed by the firmware people at Sandisk. I feel that I probably should take off another star for such a bug but I can still use the player and once I figured out what was causing it, I found it effortless to avoid. Just be aware that if you buy this player, your unit will almost certainly have this issue and you'll just have to hope you like the limited settings you can still use. -END UPDATE
Conclusion and Final Recommendation - Obviously, Sandisk has some bugs to work out. I do feel that this is a decent player for the price. I might have hesitated if I'd known about the EQ problem in advance, however. And I ended up using external software anyway (to make playlists) so it seems that the only benefit I really got in purchasing this over a Nano was that I saved money and I don't absolutely have to use any software (And it isn't made by Apple).
I'm relatively pleased with my purchase of the Sansa. As noted, I may not have purchased it if I'd known some of it's more significant flaws but you can only research a product so vigorously before it gets to the point of absurdity and you spend every waking moment researching future purchases. So far, none of the flaws has been serious enough to make me seriously regret the purchase. I've been really enjoying the benefits of having lots of good music to go. Since I got it, I've also gotten back into the habit of relaxing in bed in the darkness listening to music until my ears get sore from the pressure of the headphones.
And finally...I have to give fair warning. If you're a newbie to the world of MP3 players, you might want to stick to something like an iPod. I wish I could say that this was a perfect solution for those who are averse to the whole iPod frenzy but it just isn't. It can develop some crippling problems that tech newbies might find quite daunting to resolve. Mine hasn't (so far) but it can happen. And if it does, Sandisk's tech support might not be much help if what I've read about them is any indication.
If you don't mind doing somewhat involved firmware updates (should it become necessary), and looking around for information that the manufacturer doesn't exactly make easy to find, you should be fine with one of these.
Update - 7/15/07 - Just a few moments ago, the Sansa froze for the first time since I've had it. I was fiddling with the EQ settings at the end of an album and the unit suddenly became unresponsive for a period of about 45 seconds. Then, the screen simply went white. I remembered reading in the Sansa forum that if it locks up, holding down the power button for a period of time will reset it. This actually worked (fortunately). When it restarted, all was back to normal.
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