Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony MZ-NHF800 Silver Hi-MiniDisc Walkman with Tuner

The software - Sonicstage - is a bit awkward and frequently stalled on me at first, it wouldn't let me transfer tracks to the MD. Also, it could only cope with transferring a few tracks at a time.

However i can't fault the actual player, which is great. Because it uses normal AA batteries you don't have to carry the charger around, and it has a great battery life. The sound is crystal clear and it has a great compression rate to fit about 500 songs on a 1GB disc.

If the software had been better i would have given it 5 stars

good stuff:
HiMD means you can get shed-loads of albums (up to 40 hrs worth depending on recording mode) on a one gig disc
AA battery - always good when you run out of charge and can just use bog standard ones
record off PC and your stereo
comes with a FM AM radio, really good feature

bad stuff:
remote control is not Sony's finest, especially when trying to control the radio, rather fiddly
menus are not very intuitive

overall a really good buy, and i'm rather regretting running over it on my bike this morning and destroying it...

I'll explain why i choose this. I am going travelling for 4 months and as i am taking batteries and a charger with me i didn't want to have to take something with a seperate charger, so no in-built batteries! reluctantly I found that Hi MD was the most suitable for me. I have recieved my player and I am very happy with it all.

Build - plastic but no obvious flaws
Menus - all seem fairly intuative thus far!
Head phones - pants (but you expect that by now surely!)
Remote - contains the radio making it bulky! (which I personally am not so happy about it's a bit of a monster to have clipped to you jacket etc) but the single line display is very efficient and gives me all the info i need and buttons are all fairly logical!
Software - I have only one problem with this! when I installed the software, as the manual described, only "simple burner" was installed (A program on the disc) but not the sonic stage! So I had to "explore" the disc and find the "setup" icon (went through a few files to find it) and click that to start the installation of sonic stage! A bit of an inconvenience! but could have been disasterous if i didn't have a fairly good grip on computers! Anyway that is over now and I have found the software great it just gets on with what you expect and all my files are on the MD exactly as they appear on my comp!

Anyway the software issue and the remote are the reason it doesn't get 5/5 but I'm convinced I made the right Choice and am VERY HAPPY with the player!

Should you buy one?? Hmmm I was tempted by the 1Gb flash players from sony and would have bought one of those if i thought 1Gb would be enough for 4 months (but i don't!)

Being a thirty something I was there at the start of MD and was one of the first to buy. I have since bought more recent MD machines and MP3 players. (I am a slave to gadgets!) Minidisc never really seemed to cut it against their iPod rivals but finally these machines seem to have cracked it. Each Hi-MD holding 1Gb of music or data they make for a much more cost effective and flexible player as opposed to their expensive and restrictive MP3 rivals. The software is extremely intuative and the tranfer time is fast. My only complaint is that my early machines were brushed aluminium and felt good quality whereas this unit looks and feels the plastic that it is. Overall a great buy, especially at the price Amazon are selling them.

First of all it doesn't look like any of the images on the web, so was quite dissapointed when i received it.

-Looks more plastic then anything and at almost 3cm thick the player is bulky(due to the battey compartment at the back)
-Same applies to the inline remote which has the radio built into it,it's not the easiest thing to clip on.
-biggest dissapointment was the radio its self.The reception isn't good even if i'm just listening to it at home and its terrible on the bus

I bought it because its a hi-md player, and a bit of a novice at these mp3 things so i liked the option of recording from a hi-fi. Really wanted to like the thing but in the end wasn't happy with its size, style and radio reception so had to return it. Now i have to start looking for another mp3 player and already my head's hurting from all the choice out there, especially reading all these differnt reviews!

Hope this was of help.