Panasonic SV SD50 MP3 Player

Amazon Customer Reviews

(4 out of 5)

Listening pleasure

The sound quality is great,
and battery life of 31 hours is also very good.
The unit is the size of a small phone and to prove it I bought Samsungs phone pouch to hang this off my belt.

The unit requires Realplayer together with Panasonics plug in to put songs on the card and you can get more on using aac which sounds better than mp3 of the same size.

A playlist feature allows you to have different playlists, but this is not available yet. When available it should be included in the Panasonics media manager software.

Once songs have been put onto the card they can't be transferred back again, due to the Panasonic piracy scheme. The songs are transferred to a card reader supplied instead of directly to the device, this saves having a socket which dirt can enter.
There is no drag and drop.

There is no backlit display, but then how else do you get that long battery life.

The unit only uses SD cards, but these are a better technology and faster than MMC cards, and also more expensive.

Despite these restrictions, being able to hear quality music on the move is great. There are a lot of MP3 players out there with memory and card slots at lower cost, the advantages of this one must be its sound, and its long battery life.

It will really be useful to me when the cards comes down in price.

(3 out of 5)

Good size, easy to use, painful to load.

I bought one of these a few years ago. I used it a bit at first but it wasn't long before it ended up in the back of a drawer. It cost me $250 in Changi airport when I bought it. A disappointing purchase.

The 64MB card that comes with it is too small. You can fit one album on it at a poor quality. Then listen to it over and over about 40 times on a single AAA battery (31 hours the brochure says). Now who would ever do that? I guess the power supply engineers didn't get along too well with the storage engineers at Panasonic in those days.

The software re-encodes the music which you've probably read about elsewhere. It's more than a little irritating and was the only reason I stopped using the device.

The earphones are pretty average. Spend a hundred bucks on a pair of in ear monitors and you'll be well impressed with the sound quality of this tiny device. It's not much bigger than a matchbox. You could easily velcro it to the side of a decent pear of full sized headphones and clean the house / do the gardening / wash the car to some seriously good sound.

On cleaning the desk out the other day I found it and thought I'd give the little beastie another chance. SD memory is a lot cheaper these days. I optimistically purchased a Sandisk 2 Gigabyte SD card to try it out with some storage that would come close to the hours of music available from one little AAA battery. I had no idea if the older MP3 player could handle such a big card and fortunately it does! Sort of.. I get 1.89GB of music onto it. The software thinks it can get more but runs out of space with 50 meg to go.

The SD card reader that comes with these is USB 1.1
On an 866MHz PC with 750 Meg of ram it took me OVER 4 HOURS to transfer the music to the card. All the music files were variable bit rate MP3s at about 190k bits/sec. There were about 250 songs. Approximately 16 hours.

I now use it regularly but I choose what I load onto it very carefully and start the transfer off and let it run overnight.
These will be dirt cheap second hand, If you already have some decent storage or earphones these are worth a look.