Home > Consumer Reviews > Casio PZ-5000 Portable MP3-CD Player with Car Kit and AC Adapter

I was excited to see that there were now CD/MP3 players in the market and for purchase. The Casio looked like the one for me... so I bought it.... but I shouldn't have. Listening to this player showed me how great a technology we had out now, but it also showed me how far away we are to perfecting it.

Playing CD's: It plays CD's with a breeze. Absolutely no skipping with the shock on and I must say I was very impressed, but.. then I found out some problems. When I played an mp3 with a bitrate lower than 128 it played the song at a very fast pace as if you were listening to the chipmunks.... that I didn't like ... also loading the songs took about 5 seconds each and that killed the battery.

Features: It has some decent features. There isn't much more added to the player due to its mp3 capabilities except for a search button which is helpful... but could have been better. You can search for song's by the letter they start with or by what folder you burned the mp3's in. Even though it searches by letter, it does not show the name of the song, simply the number. Switching tracks is a pain too. Even with the search button I found myself switching from song 1 to song 78 by manually pressing the skip button. If you want blisters, get this one. I think all players should come with a 9 button remote so you can type in the number instead of searching or simply skipping to the track.

Power: OUCH!!! This really hurt me. This player has to have the lowest battery power. If you read the manual it says the player has 6 hours of battery life with the shock protection OFF! Well I had the shock protection ON and after a short hour and a half the batteries were dead. That's not what I wanted. I then decided to turn shock off, but to my surprise I found out that the button didn't work and shock was going to stay on. I simply gave up on the player when that happend. I thought maybe I used bad batteries, but I didn't, I took them out of their package and then the button wasn't working. Overall, this product isn't the worse, but it sure isn't the best .... with poor battery life this player is not worth my time. If its going to die in less than two hours I'd be sitting with the AC adaptar connected to it, and that would defeat the purpose of a PORTABLE CD Player. I'm returning this item and I decided to buy the RIO VOLT. Please let this be my savior.

On the list of features, it says that you can search by song title. This is not true. The player does not even display the title. Instead you can skip to the first song starting with any given letter. (With a lot of button pressing.) The "random" feature also has a *major* bug. It always picks the same songs! Instead of being random, it always jumps to the same songs in the same order when you use the same CD. They should call it "alternate order" because that's all it is.

Finally, the output is not loud enough, the headphone cord is too short, the player is a bit too wide, and you'd better have a lot of batteries handy. I am disappointed by this product and will be returning it.

Like I mentioned above, I went through three different off brand mp3 cd players before settling on this one. Here are my pros and cons:

Pros: -does not skip (unlike the first three player I bought) -good interface, not over designed. -sounds great (192 kbps mp3's play fine)

Cons: -does not have recharging capabilities -no on screen id3 tag support

That's pretty much it. It seems well built and reliable to me, but I guess only time will tell.

This MP3-CD player is great for playing regular cd's but I would not recomend this for mp3, If is not the correct format it play's it too fast or too slow

Lo and behold an MP3 cd player from Casio. I figured like all the other MP3/CD players this thing would skip like crazy and eat batteries in an hour but boy was I surprised! Not only does it have a great battery life but it plays Mac formatted MP3 discs. By total accident I loaded in a cd that I had made of some music I was taking to work and began listening then I realized it wasnt an ISO 9660 formatted disc. Great sound, easy navigation, sturdy hardware, with the addition of a remote or larger LCD for ID3 navigation this would easily deserve that 5th star....