SanDisk Sansa e260 4 GB MP3 Player with MicroSD Expansion Slot (Black
by SanDisk
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Our Price: $259.96 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $52.99 (click here) Category: Network Media Player See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of SanDisk Sansa e260 4 GB MP3 Player with MicroSD Expansion Slot (Black
Customer Review: Made me appreciate my earbuds all the more
Summary: 2 Stars
My new Sansa has made me appreciate my Koss "The Plug" all the more, for finally demonstrating the fidelity I gain by listening with them. Sounds I could never hear on cheap earbuds, I can hear with them. For example, the high pitched, squelchy system noises that my new Sansa generates at random but frequent intervals. Tried it with some crappy earbuds--couldn't hear those awful sounds (couldn't hear much else, either...). Ah, but with my Plugs, there they are. Harping along with Kate Rusby and her delicate melodies, standing out even between the beats in loud, thumping electronica. I have tried and failed to ignore these noises, but if you're content with the bundled earbuds, this player might be fine for you.
But I have other issues too. None so bad as the system noises with my earbuds of choice, but collectively I think they will probably lead to my returning this product.
There are two different settings for max volume, and top one is only barely adequate. This is with my Plugs--poor man's in ear isolators, and much more efficient at converting a watt into a thump than regular earbuds--and with regular earbuds the max max volume is totally inadequate. Not that I want to blow my ears out, but there are just a few songs that I must listen to at full bore.
The user interface has some annoying niggles. If I am in the main menu, I have to press the power button to go back to the now playing screen, but if I am in the context menu, it is the back button that takes me back to now playing. This is obnoxious. It takes far more button presses than it should to rate a song, which requires too much attention that should be diverted to say, my job, or riding my bicycle. And if it is in random play, I cannot go back later at a better time to rate the song (which is how I remember songs I've never heard but like), because the random play is random both forwards _and backwards_. Annoying. I'm no fan of iPods' but I believe with them, you just press in on the center button a couple of times, roll the wheel to your desired rating, and then one more press on the center to lock it in. Mucho mas grande. Also, after the screen dims, any button pressed only restores the backlight, and so it is generally necessary to press a button twice to do anything. This fact exacerbates the buttons' poor tactile feedback into a worse isue than it should be. And sometimes playing an album's songs results in one song playing twice and one not being played at all.
The player has crashed on me. Upon unplugging from the computer in MTP mode, it refused to switch back to the player. It actually flickered between the menu screen and the usb connection screen, and I was able to navigate to the settings, change the usb mode to MSC, and restart the player by plugging it into my computer and unplugging (as normally happens in MSC mode). It also crashes if I get punchy and push any buttons during the three seconds in which it is hung up right after rating a song.
Pluses: I'm not recommending this product, unless you believe my issues won't bother you. But if they don't, the screen is very nice, large and well backlit, and I enjoy the tactile feel and speed and accuracy of the scroll wheel, much like the first generation iPods, before they went to electrostatic wheels. The case is very attractive and feels durable, battery life is good, and the price is certainly right. But the musical contributions it makes are most unwelcome!!
Customer Review: Impressed with Sandisk, Impressed with Amazon
Summary: 4 Stars
On Amazon:
I've been a proud owner of a Sansa e260 for two days. I'd like to commend Amazon on their punctuality - I ordered this on December 22, 2006 with the free super savers shipping and received it on December 27, 2006. I was quite amazed at how quickly it came - perhaps this was a one time thing - but it was still impressive.
On the Sansa Design:
Now on to the Sansa. It's a very pretty little gadget, I do like the rounded shape and glossy black surface, along with the glowing blue tactile scroll wheel - for some reason that's listed as a con on CNet, but I'm quite fond of it, in comparison to Apple's clickwheel. I like the way you can feel it moving and you don't have to do some maneuvering like Apple's to try and get the highlighter on the right song. Nice, bright screen, though like most said the buttons are a little difficult to press. While it's nice and scratch resistant, the back collects fingerprints like crazy.
Song Syncing:
I'm not what you would call tech-savvy, so I did have some trouble figuring it out in the beginning. The actual song-moving was quite simple, as long as your tags are in place and correct, but for the life of me I could not understand the whole album art thing. Thanks to a forum called Anything But iPod, I was soon up and running again. For anyone who's having trouble who happens to read this - use MSC mode, and look up help on the forum mentioned. It'll save you some frustration. Once you know how to do it though, it's a cinch. If you're too busy to spend a little time, though, you might want to go with something a little simpler - it won't be as pretty, but hey, functionality over looks, right? Oh, and you should probably make sure all your information's right before syncing to the player; for some reason when I try to edit stuff it doesn't show - no big deal, maybe there'll be a firmware update for that later. Either that, or I'm not doing something right.
Videos:
They're pretty simple, all you have to do is convert your video in the media converter. If it's a DVD, it has to be decrypted before you can convert it, as usual. The only problem I found with this is that the Media converter takes FOREVER. It took me an hour to convert about 300MB of video. I don't know if that's the usual time, but I was getting bored. The quality looks good to me, again, I'm not a techy person or an audiophile so you might not want to take my word for it. Also, I couldn't figure out a way to fast forward through parts of the video efficiently, but it's not really much of a problem for me, as my videos aren't that long.
My Biggest Problem:
When I changed the USB mode to MSC and opened up Explore to try and find the music files to edit/delete, I found that that they were mysteriously absent. Turns out the files were hidden. If you change the settings so that you can see hidden files, you'll be fine. :)
The Bottom Line:
Now, the Sansa's not as bad as I've probably made it out to be, I'm in love with it, but I've been concentrating on my problems with it so hopefully others won't have the same. One gets used to the controls after awhile and it hasn't frozen up on me yet. From reading most of the bad reviews on this Sansa, most of the problems describe sound like the reviewer didn't update their firmware, was rather clumsy, and/or didn't bother spending the time to work it out. Read the instruction manual! It HELPS.
Have fun!
Customer Review: Love it, but....
Summary: 4 Stars
I bought this product (Sansa E260) simply to have a little more memory than my original SanDisk player, which is only a 256MB player - but still in great working order. After a lot of researching, I settled on the E260 - even though it was older than the FUZE, Clip, and other models. The replaceable battery was a big seller for me - as I didn't want to have it die after a year & then have to buy a whole new player.
I love the extra memory, as now I can download radio podcasts (2 - 3 hrs of content) and listen to them at my leisure, without having to discard some music to make space.
The possibility of playlists was also interesting me, as I also use the unit for learning songs that my band is playing, so want to group them together for easy access. Also, being a magician, I was looking for a way to group the music for my act in one place and then play it from there. An MP3 player allows for the easy changing of a show, simply by altering the playlist, rather than burning a new CD each time.
Here is where the problem comes in:
The player will not allow me to create playlists (at least, not in the manner that I expected). Sure, it will add the music to the player, but won't keep a folder/file called "Band Music" (for example) that would contain that music in order to access the 5 songs I need, rather than all 200 on the player. As you can see, for a magic show, this would obviously not work.
There are work-arounds, but will be a bit of a hassle if I have to do it on a regular basis.
ALSO - It seems that the player only allows two ways to decide the order of my music - either in "Shuffle Play", or by "Artist". So - even if I play by grouping of Genre, when playing from the "Country" folder - it wants to play all of the Kenny Chesney songs, before moving on to any of the Brad Paisley songs (for example) - again, unless I want to "Shuffle" (which, by the way, resets the order every time you shut the player off - so you have the potential to hear the same 3 songs - in the same order - multiple times in a row - yes, it's already happened). There should be a way to play a random mix of the songs in the "Country" folder - perhaps like in alphabetical order of the title (like my old player did).
So - overall:
Do I like it? Yes - despite my complaining, I do like it quite a bit. The controls are wonderful, after you figure them out.
Is it better than my old 256 MB player? Not even close (except for the memory).
However, I realize that if I weren't set in my ways - I would absolutely love this player (except for the Playlist issue) - so yeah, go ahead and buy one!
Okay - here is an update on this player - by using Rhapsody, it will allow you to create playlists - I was using Windows Media Player before. Rhapsody will allow you to do this by downloading their software, but you do NOT need to purchase their service as long as you are only going to load your own music. Now, it seems, my playlist issue should be a non-factor. Hooray!!
Another update (Feb-13-09): When using Rhapsody playlists, my player will FREEZE. So, now I am avoiding using playlists of any sort and am doing a home-made work around. Yes, it's cumbersome, but better than nothing!
Customer Review: I love this mp3 player!
Summary: 5 Stars
This was everything that I was looking for in a portable music device and more. Within minutes of removing it from the box, it was synced up to my laptop and I was loading music onto it. Very user friendly and intuitive. I didn't want an iPod because I didn't want to convert all my WMA music files to iTunes and I didn't want to feel so limited with a proprietary device as the iPod (although friends who own iPods love theirs). I wanted something that was affordable, held a reasonable amount of music and would accept mp3s and WMAs with no muss or fuss. This was it.
The design, size and shape is hot and fits comfortably in my hand. The sound quality is really good (although diehard audiophiles may feel differently). The screen is bright, the colors vibrant and the size just right (I only use this for music so I can't speak for the video or photo options). I like the bonuses of an FM tuner, voice recording and the ability to record FM broadcasts too. The price was right and dirt cheap at the time of purchase from amazon which made this a sweet deal.
Unlike others, I have only had two slight problems with my player. Sometimes I would lose sound in the left ear. I would either restart the system or wait a few seconds and it would do a sizzly staticy fade in. I soon discovered this only happened when I used the custom EQ option. Switching back to a factory EQ setting immediately restored the sound. Since the custom EQ doesn't do much anyway and the tabs aren't labeled, I don't feel I am missing out on much.
And I am having a heck of a time getting it to display my album art. However, that's an extra but not necessary feature for me. I will suss out the solution later, or not at all.
My only beef is not being able to connect this to an exterior sound system via the USB port but using a headphone audio cable connector thingy allowed me to connect it to my stereo system.
Other quickly solvable beefs I had at first were having to charge the battery through the USB port. Quickly solved by purchasing a Sandisk AC charger through amazon for an unbelievably low price.
Also, the control buttons are tiny and hard to press and the surface of the player scratches easily. I also occasionally pressed the voice record button by accident but not as often as other reviewers seemed to. All of the above were quickly solved by purchasing a Speck Products toughskin case also available through amazon. It's a thick stylish casing that adds great grip to the unit, comes with a durable removable belt clip, a screen protector, recesses the control wheel, makes the control buttons easily accessible and prevents the record button from accidentally being pressed (you have to push hard and firmly to activate the record button).
Also, the headphones that come with the unit are not the best. I use my Sony Fontopia headphones.
Overall, for this being my first mp3 player I am highly satisfied and would recommend this to anyone who wants a simple, easy to use player. However if you're a diehard technophile you will probably hate and gripe about little things that won't bother the average user. But for the average joe, you can't go wrong.
Customer Review: great video and audio
Summary: 4 Stars
I wanted to wait about 3 months before writing this review - I'd feel horrible if I praised it after 2 months, only to have it go bad on the third. Anyway, unlike most happy owners who praise this as a great alternative to an iPod Nano, I'm kicking myself for ever getting buying an iPod (okay, it was a present for my wife) seeing how much better a player this is. The Sansa isn't as slim as a Nano, but when you hit the size of a Zippo lighter, does every extra mm down really matter that much? It's really my first mp3 player, so much of my love stems from the novelty of being able to carry around gigabytes worth of music.
I'm no audiophile, but the sound quality was good, and the Sansa's firmware allows you to sort through your music by song title, album, artist or genre. (To get your song's identifying info just right, you should download a good mp3 tagging program; I've been happily using "mp3tag", which is available free for DL - it's simple to use and configure, but that doesn't mean that there aren't better programs available on the internet).
Transferring your music is simple - your Sansa will connect to the computer using a USB port. The Sansa uses two connection modes: MTP (which treats the Sansa like a media player to be synced) and UMS (which treats the player as an extra HD - happily enough, this mode, which I find easier to use, also allows you to use that add-on tagging software, so you get the best of both worlds). The buttons are bit on the thin side, and you have to be careful when using the forward or reverse buttons to scan through songs lest you also skip to the next/earlier track. You can easily scan within mp3 tracks or add songs to your "go list".
The surprise here is the video player. Though the screen is small, and pixelations are a fact of life on playback, the resulting images are easily watchable. (Although it's probably optimal for character dramas and sitcoms that lack any demanding visuals; the included movie, a 30-second spot likely inspired by one of the latter "Star Wars" movies, was an unfortunate choice for spotlighting the Sansa's video capabilities.) Framerate is about 15fps - it's noticeable, but it's hardly a slideshow. Video files have to be converted before they'll play on the Sansa which...is no problem at all. The accompanying software is simple and is finicky only against files with really long names. Just find the files you want, click "convert" and the program takes care of the rest. My commutes are now survivable thanks to the Sansa and hours of unwatched TV. Playback can be a problem though - if you fastforward too much, the video breaks down. Luckily, the software automatically breaks every video file down into half-hour sized chunks. Left alone, the video played well - with only infrequent skips, and few jumps between video and audio syncing.
The Sansa charges off your PC's USB port. For those not connected 24-7, a Macally charger can be had for about [...]. However, the Sansa has good endurance - I packed one on vacation and managed to not need a charger despite watching several hours of video and listening to a fair number of mp3s. The Sansa isn't just a great alternative to the iPod, it's a great player all around.