Electronics : Sandisk Sansa e280 - 8Gb MP3 & Video Player

Rating: - I love it!
After my old Rio Carbon finally bit the dust I decided to break with my tradition of only looking at what MP3 players my immediate family were using and do some real research into what was out there to find one that best suited me. 3 Weeks and far too many websites and shops later I settled on the 8GB Sansa (which in accordance with the laws of shopping was actually one of the first ones I looked at).

Firstly I want to address a few things other customer reviews left me confused about:
- The player does have custom EQ, as well as a range of pre-sets to choose from, and you can change between them on the player itself.

- It is possible to fast forward and rewind a track while listening to it. Tapping the buttons once will skip to the next/last track, holding it down will fast forward or rewind (same as most players I believe).

- You CAN listen to music whilst browsing the menus.

- It is possible to queue up tracks whilst listened to another one (pick 'add to go list').

- There is a 'shuffle all' function in addition to shuffling just one album/artist/play list ect. You simply have to pick 'play all' and then turn shuffle on.

- I haven't had any problems pressing the buttons at all (my fingers are an average of 1.5cm across at the tip), and it's even easier with a rubber case.

- Music is added by dragging and dropping in Windows Explorer. How easy this is will be entirely dependant on how well organised your music collection is. With mine all sorted by artist and then by album it takes no time at all to find what I want. If your music is just one massive folder it will be harder. But then you can use various music player programs instead.

- Music on the player can be viewed by artist, by album, by song name, genre, rating, or you can select a play list. There is also a 'play all' and 'play previous' function.

- There is a reset function.

- The battery is removable (how they missed this I don't know because it's a major point in many reviews but one reviewer below claimed it wasn't possible).

The player loses half a star on my rating because with 10GB of music (I bought a 2GB SD card) it takes a little while to start up but usually no longer than it takes me to untangle my headphones.
It loses another half a star because the first one I got wouldn't save any of the settings - making custom EQ unusable, but their support centre was extremely helpful and when it couldn't be fixed Amazon dispatched a replacement before I even had time to send the original back, leaving me player-less for just one day and to be honest it was such a minor problem I would probably have kept the player if they couldn't replace it.

3 Weeks on the replacement is working perfectly. It's been on a 2 day trip to Wales and numerous train journeys and has been nothing but brilliant. With my Sony MDR-ED21LP headphones the volume rarely needs to be more than halfway on the 'normal' setting (the player also has a 'loud' setting) and even managed to be perfectly audible on the London Underground and over my mums dance music in the car. I should also mention that when using custom EQ (and decent headphones) the player has excellent bass and great sound quality all around.)

I haven't used the picture or video options, this is purely an MP3 player for me but if you want a small, durable, affordable 8-10GB player with all the essential features you can't do better than this.

---

Rating: - Media Player Perfection
First of all i would like to sa that the sansa does take a little while to start up but it is no means a long time to wait (areoun 10 - 15 seconds) as for addin to music onto your player it is incredably simple as it only requires a simple drag and drop system no annoying software is required. And as this player uses flash memory rather that a hard drive it makes the player much more durrable.

The software bundled that allows you to convert images and videos to the player is incredably simple to use and works great.

In my oppion anyone looking to buy a great mp3 player for work/school or for just generally listening to music need look no futher, this is a great music player bundled with pleanty of cool extras such as the video playback, images and the voice recorder. Also as this player supports WMA files far more music can be stored onto it, rather than convential players only accecpting mp3 files. All in all i am very pleased with this purchased and would deffinatles recommend it. Only grumble was that no mains plug was included since it is intended to be charded through a usb port however i also baought a sansa UK mains charger which also works a treat.

---

Rating: - i dont mean to bad mouth it but..
its pretty nice to look at an its light an all that. took me a while to figure out how to work it an that an put music on it because the manual offers little help there. then immeadiately i found it takes a long time to load up once music is on. also i find it is very sluggish to respond when selecting a song on it, you press the button, wait, press it five more times before it reacts. very annoying. also its frozen up on me now and that is very annoying and again the manual poffers no help on what to do with it and with out a reset switch or a removable battery or suchlike i was a bit confused till the magical internet saved me.
i dont mean to bad mouth it tho, its good sound quality an that and has a nie shuffle function and suh. but i ould muh rather have my old zen micro back. if only they all didnt just brake after a year anyway. atleast with this one you pay less as it is a less well known name.
Slim Noble

---

Rating: - Brillaint but a little slow
Amazing little player for the price, had it over a month now and have had no problems with it. As mentioned before it is quite slow to load, but is much quicker without an expandable card.

The video doesn't seem to work off the card, but not really something that i was after as the screen is pretty small. Wouldn't recommend the Griffin iTrip for it either, as although it charges it, the quality through the radio is pretty poor, and i have to turn all the EQ values to minimum in order to get a (semi) clear sound. Not sure wether the player or the iTrip are at fault here.

A well designed, good looking and well performing mp3 player, with suberb battery life, i've used it for 12 hours straight and it still had quarter charge. For the price i would recommend!

---

Rating: - Slow to start up, buggy firmware - beware.
This is the 2nd of 3 MP3 players I've bought.

I have a 1gb iRiver - Flash - AA battery

Then I bought the 8gb Sansa, expandable using memory sticks with a replacable battery.

I've since bought an 80gb iPod.

The Sansa has by far the slowest startup time of the 3 players.
The iRiver is almost instant on, the Ipod maybe 5-10 seconds.

The Sansa can take > 1 minute. Had anyone mentioned this, I would have given this player a miss. I'm often half way to my destination on foot before I can actually start using the player. A beta firmware upgrade to fix this issue has been around for over 6 months with no sign of being completed.

Sandisk seem to have stopped development of firmware for this player and moved on to other things & as they recently made 10% of their staff redundant, I don't expect any further updates to fix other bugs.