Sony MZNH600D Hi-MD MiniDisc Walkman by Sony
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Digital camera reviews of Sony MZNH600D Hi-MD MiniDisc Walkman
Digital camera Review: MD Please!
Summary: 5 Stars
This player is great. Really great. MiniDisc in general is great- a durable media that offers you unlimited storage (you can buy more discs) and that does not skip (P.S., I have seen iPods skip)!
The Software it comes with is bad unless you download the upgrade (version 3.4) which actually works really, really well.
Well, MiniDIscs in general rock!
Digital camera Review: MD's are over. Get used to it.
Summary: 1 Stars
Do you remember the loner who no one liked and would mope around the school yard during recess by himself? Perhaps you were that loner. But it doesn't matter, because the biggest corporate loner on the block is Sony.
If Sony has a mission statement, it must include something about proprietary products, as Sony always has a tendency to go the way of making technologies that no one else uses. Well, there have been some hits and misses. The Hi-8 camcorder format was a hit. The Trinitron picture tube was a hit. However, the Betamax and Memory Stick are only just two of the misses, and the Minidisc is no exception.
While Sony has indeed reintroduced the MD with new 1 GB capabilities, the glaring issues are still there. First the MD's take a long time to load/spin-up and it is tedious to switch tracks. The buttons on the player are placed in a haphazard manner as usual, and the music licensing protection features only make things worse. You can load songs onto the MD player, but not vice versa unless it is to the same computer. Not even if you own more than one computer. Not even if you accidentally had to reinstall Windows on your sole computer.
Then we have the horrible software that only allows you to export a song 3 times only. That's right, if you export your song 3 times, you can't do it anymore. And not only is this feature frustrating, it's easily remedied by simply changing the name of the file. Talk about a waste of time. Futhermore, more rage ensues when you find out that Sony's "support" of MP3's and WMA's really means that the program will encode everything to Sony's proprietary Atrac3 format. That just about adds about an extra 10 seconds to every file transfer. Adding insult to injury, the Atrac3 format is not used in anywhere but the MD software and the MD itself. It's a proprietary product WITHIN a proprietary product!!!
What are the chances of MD's and Atrac3 becoming widespread? None. MD's have been around for almost a decade now, and they are still rare as unicorns. So there we have it: the new ensemble of Hi-MD products are still slow, still way too over limiting, and still largely unpopular.
If my scathing words do not convince you of the inevitable demise of MD's, just look at Sony's new product line. They make white Fontopia earphones that cater to iPod-users. They recently started a line of hard-drive and solid state MP3 players like so many other companies today. Ready to ditch MD? I am.
Digital camera Review: Minidisc vs Ipod
Summary: 4 Stars
UPDATE: So I finally went and bought it and luv it. I burn the songs at 132kbs tried 64 and it doesn't work for me. Everythings fine, if you read the review on c-net you would think this is a flawed product i think apple paid them to downplay this. This is a much better deal than an Ipod. It takes AA batteries no recharging and you don't have to worry about a hard drive crashing or being away and having nowhere to recharge. You might want to wait a month, sony is coming out with the second generation hi-md players in april and they support mp3 if that is important to you however I think they all use gumstick batteries (recharge required) instead of AA which is why i didn't wait and went for this. Oh yeah, sonic stage 3.0 is out and so far, no major problems (like constant crashing)...
I actually don't have the high MD player yet, I have the Net-MD minidisc player, had it since september and still use it on a daily basis. I don't use cd's anymore after getting this. I actually would like one of the hard disc players but before I drop 300+ dollars they are going to have to fix some issues that I have. It scares me when I hear stories of the hard drive freezing up and being rendered useless and me personally I hate anything that comes with the description "rechargable". What if I'm away for more than 14 or so hours and can't recharge? I'm stuck. With these minidisc players you just pop in a SINGLE AA battery and youre kool. With mine I change the battery maybe a little less than once every two weeks. I'm getting the Hi-md player next week because I just want to carry around one disc. I HATE SONIC-STAGE one day it works and another day it doesn't but Real Player works just fine. One thing glad about this is that it's powered by the USB cable. Oh yeah, I just performed a test. I ripped a song from cd directly to the player I own now and then transferred the mp3 version over to see if the double conversion from cd to mp3 to atrac was perceptible, if there is a difference it wasn't noticeable.
Digital camera Review: More than expected.
Summary: 5 Stars
At this price (below $170) Hi-MD is a beast! The unit is so light that I carry it everywhere even without headphones just for the sole purpose of data exchange. It is so much geeker than those pen-drives. And for few bucks I can buy a bunch of old, dirt cheap MD disks.
The only one thing I can not understand in this business is why Sony is not pushing this product as much as it deserves???
For music I am mostly using MD's copied on my stereo, so the software does not hurt this much.
Digital camera Review: Nice System, but what is SONY thinking?
Summary: 3 Stars
This Player is very nice and capacity is OK for a removable media, however the whole Hi-MD---OpenMG----SonicStage---ATRAC is very inconvenient to use.
I will summarize:
PROS:
-ATRACplus algorithm sound decent at 64kbps, comparable to MP3 at 128kbps in my opinion. There is also a 256kbps option which sounds very good, but files are pretty big for the Hi-MD capacity, makes it inconvenient.
-The advertised price for the Hi-MD blank disks is ok, around $7.
-Price compares to that of the MiniIpod or some Flash MP3 players, however this is "supposed" (read below) to be upgradeable by buying more blank Hi-MDs
-Runs on AA battery.
-You can run with it and get no skips.
CONS:
-You MUST use SonicStage software to transfer files to / from the MD.
-No MP3 support on the unit, only plays ATRAC. MP3s are transcoded by the PC software.
-SonicStage is a little bit unreliable.
-You CAN NOT upload songs from MD to your PC. So you can't use the MDs as a backup of your PC music collection, because if your PC fails, you can't upload the songs again.
-Even if you encode songs in ATRACplus with SonicStage, you can't move the files to another PC. And I'm not talking about illegal moving, you might have more than one PC.
-You can only play (so far) ATRACplus files with Sony's software (in your PC, I mean).
-Hi-MD blank discs are scarce, not even sony online store has them in stock at the moment of this review.
I think this unit is a good alternative to a Flash based MP3 player of medium capacity (256-512MB) if you can find it for less than $200.
For a little more than this you can get a 4/5 GB HD player like the MiniIpod and save the hassle of the propietary format, algorithm, rights protection format (OpenMG) and having only one choice of software.
I think Sony could have made a good product but it's taking the wrong path towards protection of copyrights. They shouln't do so at the expense of reducing the product functionality and reliability.