Full Review

I own my SanDisk Sansa E280 for one month now, and I must say I am very happy with it. The user interface is good: the screen is large enough, and the scroll wheel works very well to scan through long lists of songs. The common complaint about the small buttons being to small is justified, but because of the scroll wheel, one doesn't need to use them very often.

The firmware provided works fine, playing MP3 files directly, without extra file conversion. Also, it enables you to easily retrieve your music, even in quite large collections. This, I think, is a very important property of an MP3 player. Currently, I have got 1600 tracks stored on it, and still have no trouble finding things quickly. Note however, that you will have to spend some time classifying your music into well-chosen genres, otherwise you will be scrolling a lot. The firmware (version 1.02.18) does have some nasty bugs, but they all have a workaround. See: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Sandisk_Sansa_MP3_players/e200#Bugs.

Although 8GB is plenty of room for a large number of tracks (approximately 1600), you will still have to strip down you music library considerably. This requires some extra organization, which is a boring task (you'll also need suitable music library organizer, such as MediaMonkey). However, this has the big advantage that you will easily find your favorite music on a device that evidently has a more restricted user interface than a personal computer. One real drawback of this player is that it works only with the playlist format of Windows Media Player, so if you want to use another (better) application, such as I do, you will have to cope without playlists. I solved this by using the music genre tag as a kind of playlist, which I think works very well. I even think it is an easier system than using playlists.

Apart from the built-in flash memory, there is a microSD expansion slot, so you can extend the device's capacity a little. Regrettably, the driver is limited to cards of 2GB, so you can benefit only little from it. The alternative (open-source) firmware, RockBox, claims it can handle cards up to 32GB. However, at the time of writing (19-11-2007), the software was not a worthy replacement for SanDisk's firmware, as no USB connection is supported yet. A more serious problem is that the microSD card is not always successfully detected. You need to reinsert the card, after which the music tag database is rebuilt, which takes 3 minutes or so.

The sound quality is just perfect. You must know I am using my Sansa as a replacement for my CD player in my home stereo system. I found working with compact discs is too restrictive. For example, most of the time I was too lazy to change disks; also, a large part of my music collection I've only got in the form of MP3 files, meaning I had to burn a lot of CDs, just to be able to hear them through my quality speakers. If you'dd like to do something similar, be warned: you won't be able to connect your Sansa headphones output to your stereo input directly! The reason is that the output signal is too weak, but more importantly, there is a problem with the difference in impedance of a typical stereo amplifier and the impedance of a headphones set. I solved this by inserting a mixer (a Behringer Xenyx 802) between the Sansa and my amplifier. The resulting system sounds equally good as when I use the dedicated CD player component of my home stereo! I must say this surprised me a little: there is no hiss, no background hum, and you get CD quality sound. I think I won't be using my CD player a lot anymore. Note that the alternative option, using the "Sansa base station" instead of the mixer, (probably) has the disadvantage of having to use the remote control, which has more limited controls. As the base station costs approximately as much as a small mixer, I prefer the headphones-output-option.

The battery lifetime seems long enough, as a weekly connection to my PC is sufficient to keep the battery in condition. I must say I like the fact that to recharge the battery, you only need to connect the player through USB to your computer. This way, you don't need a special power adapter, and you need to connect to your PC now and then anyway, to put new music on the player. One (very small) drawback is that there is no standard USB connector, but rather a SanDisk-specific one; but this is something I can live with, as I upload my music always from my home computer. If you plan to do otherwise, be prepared to carry the SanDisk USB cable with you everywhere you go.

Finally, there is a built-in voice recorder. I was surprised of the quality of the recordings. You won't be able to register a live performance in CD-quality of course, something for which I think you'll need a really expensive device, but it is sufficient for recordings of the practice sessions at my music academy. In any case, the quality is better than the dedicated dictaphone devices I have tried so far, and even the user interface for recording is adequate.

As you notice, I am really satisfied with my purchase. This device exceeded my expectations by far: I fail to come up with a serious drawback. As the icing on the cake, the Sansa 8GB version is very cheap in comparison with other players. To clarify my point: when I bought my 8GB Sansa, I paid 125€ for it. In the same store, they sold 8GB SanDisk USB sticks for 90€. Therefore, I would like to recommend the Sansa E280 wholeheartedly to everybody who is looking for a good MP3 player.