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The Sansa View does a great job of playing music and videos like movies or music videos but has a lot of added features along with the great video and audio. The player does a great job of quickly adding music through your choice of programs like Rhapsody, iTunes or Windows Media Player for an easy way to organize and purchase music.
Converting those odd formats or getting a DVD movie onto your Sansa View may take a bit of work but you can get it to work without having to buy more programs or subscriptions. I really don’t like the idea of having to buy another program in order to get my movies, music or whatever on to my MP3 Player.
The Sansa View is a nice sized video player that is handy enough to watch a movie and large enough to see what is going on in a movie or video but small enough to carry around. The View is about 4 inches tall by 2 inches wide and 3/8 of an inch thick; certainly small enough to have around your arm with an elastic arm band. The screen of the View is a nice 320x240 resolution and can play videos at 30 frames per second for smooth video and has the common 44.1 kHz audio sampling rate.
The View has a nice user interface with simple menu and easy to use controls with a wheel type control to scroll through menus as well as enter buttons using the four directions of the wheel and pressing. The center button is an enter button while the other button returns you to the main menu or Home page and the pause/play, submenu and Home buttons are backlit.
The menus are easy to navigate and once you get used to it pretty quick to get to various sections and the things you want to do. The menus are laid out well and you really do not have to read the manual to use the View at all for general audio or video playing.
I found I could plug it in, turn it on and start loading music without having to do any reading of the manual which does have plenty of help if you need it. The most help I have needed was converting files and using the converter to get my DVD movies onto the View.
The View can use a Mini Secure Digital memory card and give you extra storage easily but I found the 8GB internal storage plenty to start with, but it is nice to have the expansion. I placed a couple of movies as well as about fifteen CD’s on the Sansa View and only used 1.7GB of the internal memory.
The recording function is also a nice feature and works just as well as an Olympus Digital Voice Recorder I have and can record plenty on the internal memory. You may not use the radio or the voice recorder much but they are a nice feature to have but I would not like to get too many of these kinds of features on my MP3 player.
One thing that I like that is lacking, this is a good thing, hear me out, is there are not too many of those extra features that bog down the player. I like having a few extra features but not so many that they have skimped on other things, an audio video player needs to be first a good quality audio and video player.
Next they have not made things so difficult in dealing with the audio player and the various ways to get stuff onto it and that means a decent converter program as well as being open to many formats. The Sansa Media Converter works very well for many of the formats I tried but it also had some difficulties as well, nothing works perfectly.
A few audio and video files I tried to just drag and drop would not convert and I had to either skip it or find out why; usually it was an incompatible format. Some I just could never figure out why, right format and all it just would not work but this happens with all kinds of things.
I was able to easily transfer and convert common file formats and did so without many problems so getting my favorite movies, videos and music to my Sansa View was pretty easy. The Sansa View does a great job at playing the media and is pretty easy to use with its roller disc and buttons with the menu system working easily.
The Sansa View is a really great Video MP3 Player and well worth the cost of about $150 for the 8GB version and about $200 for the 16GB version. I highly recommend the Sansa View for a really good and simple to use Video MP3 Player with a few good features but really good audio and video quality.