Home > Consumer Reviews > Panasonic SL-CT800 Ultra Thin Portable CD Player

This is a really good size in terms of portability, but the frankly, the battery sucks. Even if rechargeable, it dies out too quickly. Even though it is nice and portable, it also skips alot, at least from my experience. I gave it a 3 because of the portability, the CD Player Dream, if you will. I would get the SL-SX430 if you don't mind to give up a little portability. The SL-SX430 has an insane battery life but is a little bit bare bones but comes with a remote, which is always a plus.

I had the same problem as another reviewer on this forum. The rechargeable battery died. I had barely used it. If you forget to unplug the CD from the power cord after recharging is complete you will fry the battery. I've never seen this behavior on any other rechargeable device. This is a serious design flaw by Panasonic. It's a shame that such a serious problem undermines what would otherwise be a great product.

I've owned and used this for several months. I am happy overall but here is a list of things that bother me:

1) The romote control does light up which is good, but stays lit for only 7 seconds after you push a button. It takes MUCH MUCH longer than that for song titles to disply fully. Pushing a button to keep the light illuminted for another 7 seconds doesn't really help cuz it'll stop displaying the title and will display the info for whatever button you pressed instead.

2) The wire from the remote to the player is too short in my opinion (2 feet). It doesn't reach properly from the player inside your backpack or briefcase to your chest area where you'll probably want the remote clipped to. I also will sometimes keep the player under my car seat attached to my car stereo, and there too the wire is just a little too short.

3) The remote knob and buttons suck. They are too small and seem to play games with you. The diplay is too small as well. The entire remote and display should be much bigger! I would prefer to see the entire album title, artist name, and song title at the same time rather than small portions of only one of the above. Also, the display scratches too easily! And there is no pause button on the remote either. All very annoying.

4) The headphones that it came with have a good sound quality but they are a pain to use. One wire for one ear is much shorter than the other. One ear is always being tugged and you can't get comfortable.

5) The player does not always play MP3s in numerical or alphabetical order. If the tunes were converted to MP3 directly from a regular audio CD album, it seems to play in order. However, for people who often organize MP3 songs themselves individually on their home computer, most tracks will not play in order despite how you name them. Some tracks won't play at all! There is a small mention about this in the instruction manual. But really, this problem should not exist at all!

6) YOU CANNOT FORWARD OR REWIND WITHIN AN MP3 TRACK! You can only skip ahead to the next track or back to the previous track when listening to MP3s. This won't bother people too much who listen to 2-minute tracks, but for many people like me who listen to long tracks, this is really annoying!

7) The battery level indicator is not accurate. With my unit, it goes from full to 3/4 rather soon, but it can stay on empty (flashing danger) for another 12 hours.

8) I am sure I can think of more annoying things, but these are the big ones. However, like I said, overall the player itself is very good.

This was bought as a gift and I absolutely love it! The Directions are easy to follow and it's perfect for those people that love to workout. Highly recommended!~

Everything was working great initially.
But two weeks later, the CD player is dead!
I tried it for a long while and finally decided that the rechargeable battery went bad since CD player still works on AC!
Why the battery died so fast? I remembered that we put it on charger for a whole night a few days ago! And this baby is so vulnerable to a very common human habit. Look! lots of people put cellphone on AC charger overnight and that doesn't kill their cellphones.

And the manual does say "battery may go flat if AC adaptor is kept on after battery is finished charging" and the battery is only in warranty for 10 DAYS!
And I searched lots of places even on www.panasonic.com, can't find any replacement of this new and special Ni-Mh type(Why not Ni-Cd?) battery.

It basically useless without its rechargeable battery.
Really disappointed!