Sweet little player

On a short list of digital audio players, the Sansa E250 stood out for a few reason which led to its purchase. First its rather small, it can display photos, play videos and tune in FM radio stations as well as record audio. Secondly, it has a slot for memory expansion. Two GB sounds big enough now, but what gives for the future? And lastly, all of that for a reasonable price. Has it done all those things well? It all depends on how high your standards are.

The device The E250 is 3.5" long, 1.7" wide, and .6" inches thick. The screen is 1.8" diagonally (1.88" long and 1.25" wide) and supports 65K colors. There is a TransFlash / MicroSD (not the more common miniSD) slot for adding an additional memory card. There is a record button on the side, and a hold button on top. The rest of the controls are set from using the center wheel and the five buttons on the face on the unit (one in the center of the wheel and the other four at a north-south-east-west arrangement around the wheel. The ring lights a cool blue color when its spun. The whole thing feels quite solid with the exception of the wheel and the buttons on the front. The buttons are a bit hard to press (I use a lot of fingernail work to press them) and the ring is cheapie feeling plastic that rattles against the center button if you shake the unit fairly hard.

The ring and front buttons are the main way one navigates through the menus. They work quite well. Selecting a task is pretty easy and the menus move from one to another quickly. On the whole, navigation is excellent although its sometimes hard to figure out how to exit submenus and return to the main menu, especially the radio submenu (hint: push the power button to return to the main menu). The player boots in a somewhat longish eight seconds.

There is a printed Quick Start Guide along with a 44-page User Guide in pdf on the enclosed CD.

The battery is usable-replaceable although none are available anywhere as of this writing (May 2006)*UPDATE -January 2007 - numerous on-line stores now stock the replacement battery, usually aroung $15.00*. It also lasts quite a bit, I got 15 hours of mixed music, video, and radio (mostly music) There’s also nearly zero for Sansa add-ons, but I expect that will change as Sandisk ships more on them.

*UPDATE January 2007 - there's no less than 40 add-ons available on Sandisk's site ranging from speaker docks to FM transmitter, to AC chargers. Sandisk has leveraged the e200 series #2 sales position into a wealth of third-party products. If you build it, they will come.*

Available memory amounts to 1,889.2 MB after formatting and system files are taken into account.

The player has several user-controlled settings that one can fiddle with such as the length of time the backlight stays on, the brightnes of the screen, and auto shutdown. There is a setting for easily updating the firmware of the player, a welcome touch.

Digital Audio - The E250 plays MP3 and WMA files only. One can use Media Player 10 or above to sync files from a computer to the player (and you'll need to if you bought DRM-protected music from an online store) or you can just drag & drop them as if the player were a hard drive. Windows Media Player 10 (WMP10) will create folders by artist complete with CD cover art. The cover art will display when the song is playing.

My songs are a mix of 192 (mostly) & 128 kbs MP3s with a smattering of 107 kbps WMA. The player will hold about 500 songs total. I have 100 songs on the player and they take up
378 MB.

There are many ways to play back music, for example by artist, album, or song. One can also use playlists, by genre, or by rating. Or you can just use shuffle play and play all your songs in random order. The player allows the user to add or change ratings of a song and also lets users build playlists on the go. One can, of course, use playlist imported from WMP10.

The player has eight preset EQ settings (Rock, Pop, Hip Hop, etc.) that the user can move through when a song is playing so they can choose what they like best.

Oh, and the included earbuds are better than average.

RadioWhile radio wasn’t high on my list, the included FM tuner is a nice feature. It will auto scan the FM band and preset any stations that have a signal. You can then add or delete stations as you desire. The player will also record broadcast for later playback. It records as a 48 kHz 16-bit stereo WAV file (about 190 kb per second), which sounds just fine.

Photos-are stored in either jpg or bmp format depending on the converter's choice. I found that if I rotated the photos 90 degrees they filled the screen better (came in a landscape rather than portrait). The file sizes are small, typically 44kb, so plenty will fit. They look very good on the screen, although its pretty much single-user viewing. The screen must be viewed head-on for best results. But its no worse than many digital camera LCDs, and I was quite pleased with the photos. You can watch a slideshow while a song is playing.


Video-are played back in Quicktime format at 15 frames per second with 16bit stereo sound. The Quicktime format isn't one of the better compression formats tho, and it results in video files that are quite large. Through a video capture card on my computer I recorded several shows to put on the E250. One has to use the Media Converter software as it not only does the Quicktime conversion, it also orients the video so it shows landscape on the screen (you have to hold the player sideways). The software will convert MPG1, MPG2, AVI, WMF,MOV, and VOB files. As a test, I recorded a half hour TV show, an hour show, and a two hour movie. The Media Converter software converted the half hour show (which was recorded in 720*480 MPG2) in 17 minutes and it took 386 MB of space on the E250. The hour show (which was actually 43 minutes after I chopped the commercials out) was recorded as an AVI file at 380*292 resolution. It took 29 minutes to encode and totaled 521 MB. The two hour movie (which ended up as 87 minutes without commercials) took 44 minutes to encode and came in at 874 MB. That works out to be about 10-11 MB per minute of video. The videos were transferred to the E250 in multiple files, each 10 minutes long. During playback there is a 3-4 second delay while the next file is opened. The screen goes black at that time. One can open up any file as a means of jumping ahead (for example if I watched the first 30 minutes of the movie, I can open up movie file #4 and pick up the action from there). Speaking of action, I expected the 15 frames per second format to hit fast-moving action sequences pretty hard. And it does, but nearly as bad as I expected. The movie I recorded was "X-Men" that does have some pretty quick action. Rarely does the slow frame rate become bothersome, perhaps because of the small screen size.

The conversion software is pretty limited. There's no options for changing compression methods (either more compression for a smaller file, or less for better quality) in the software. It does one method and one method only. It also has to be connected to the player in order to do a successful conversion (see *update* below). If the E250 isn't connected, it'll go through the entire conversion, give a failure message but won't store it anywhere on the computer for latter use. It'd be nice to be able to convert 5-6 shows and have them ready to load on the player. *Update* I was wrong. It does indeed store them, generally in a newly created "My Documents/Sansa Media Converter" subdirectory. It just doesn't tell you it does.

Let's just say video isn't the strongest point, but it does work OK.

Audio The E250 can also record audio through its internal microphone. The mic isn’t sensitive enough pick up voices more than 9 feet away so consider it at best a conference room mic, not a auditorium mic. Still, it does work fairly well, recording to a 48 kHz 16-bit mono WAV file.

Coolness factor Like beauty, coolness is in the eye of the beholder. But the player does impress the friends and family. The lighted ring is a nice touch and the color screen is very sharp and good-looking.

The player comes with a set of earbuds, a USB charging cable (you need to have a USB device to charge this), a plastic lanyard, a protective pouch, and a CD with the manual & software.

Sandisk also makes a 4GB (E260) and a 6GB (E270) model that are identical except for storage capacity.

There you have it. There's quite a lot of features to this little player. Some of them are great, some just OK, none poor and no glaring omissions. For me, this is one sweet little player!