Digital Home Thoughts: A Different Viewpoint: The SanDisk Sansa View

Videos
Sandisk has made a serious effort to make the View a capable video player. The screen is considerably larger than most audio only players. The View’s removable storage feature gives it the necessary capacity to carry several movies at once, an important advantage since such files can be very large. And Sandisk has supplied an NVIDIA GoForce 6100 multimedia processor, intended to combine high frame rates with low power consumption. With these features, you’d expect the View to fare well as a video player. So does it meet expectations?

Well, it’s not perfect, but it does quite well. The 6100 chip is claimed to provide up to 30fps at VGA resolution with H.264 and MPEG-4 files. I created a number of files from DVD’s of TV shows. Through trial and error, I found that I got the best results with MPEG-4 files at 640x480 resolution. Playback is smooth, with just a little stuttering during fast action scenes. The image is crisp and colors are very good, although I found skin tones to display a slight shift towards green. Audio is impressive, with great stereo separation. Controls are identical to those for audio playback.

I compared the View’s video performance with my Motorola Q9h Windows Smartphone. Both can use the same files. The main advantage of the Q is more natural skin tones. Beyond that, the View is superior as a video player. The Q will sometimes appear to freeze on a single frame, but it isn’t actually frozen... the sound continues to play and the progress bar advances. In 10 or so seconds, the video jumps ahead to catch up with the audio. To get acceptably smooth operation with the Q, I’d have to dial down the quality to Low (effectively reducing the frame rate). The View, on the other hand, handled videos recorded at 30fps with apparent ease.
While I don’t recommend viewing an all day movie marathon on a 2.4” screen, the View should work just fine to kill a few hours between flights.

Photos
The same features that make the View a capable video player also make it a fine photo viewer. Photos can be viewed as thumbnails or filenames displayed with the associated thumbnail (this is similar to the album cover display in Figure 12). In either mode, press the action button to see a full screen display of the currently selected picture.

Photos can also be displayed in a slideshow. You can set the interval between slides and select music to play during the show. The show can be set to loop continuously. Display order is limited to alphabetically by file name or shuffling. The only file format supported is .jpg. Photos can be organized in folders, and each folder is treated as an album by the View.

As displayed by the View, photos are sharp with vibrant colors. With the capability to use high capacity storage cards, you can bring all of your vacation shots with you.

Other Features
FM Radio: This is a popular feature that is unavailable on most iPods. You can set up to 20 presets and cycle through them by pressing the action button. The View can also record what’s currently playing. Sound quality is good, but the headphone cord, which serves as the antenna, must be well extended for best reception.

Audiobooks: The View supports audiobooks in the popular Audible format. The books are divided by chapter and the View can jump from chapter to chapter. Fast forward/reverse starts out slowly (about 1 minute of play time every 5 seconds) then accelerates to about 4 minutes per second. A book will resume at the place where you left off, but it would be nice to be able to set a bookmark.

Podcasts: The View supports podcasts in common audio formats (.mp3, most commonly). For a podcast to be listed as a podcast, the genre must be set to “Podcast”. Aside from that, podcasts work just like music files.

Voice recorder: This works as you'd expect. The microphone is suitably sensitive and sound quality is acceptable. If you need to do a lot of recording, the View's removable storage is a plus here.