Customer Reviews

Samsung YP-Z5AB 4 GB Digital Audio Player (Black)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I owned a Iriver H10 5GB which died 13 months after I purchased it. The player was problematic at best when it did work. Very poor customer support etc, so I wanted to do a lot of research before I spent $200+ dollars on a player. FYI if you plan on running purchase a MP3 player that uses flash memory, any Hard drive based model does not take shock well.
I eventually got down to the Samsung 4GB and San disk 4/6 Gb models. I decided to purchase the Samsung and have been very pleased. I was used to windows media player and have mostly WMA files and some WMA-10 (copy protected files). It was seemless to transition to Samsung. I used playlists already on my computer and added about 2 GB of songs and was up and running in 20 minutes max. Player charged fully in 1.5 hours and the playback is excellent. I have never submitted a review before but since it was hard to find many opinions online I wanted to share mine. The only downside is that you do have to plug into a computer to charge but this is not a big issue for me. I do not travel often and I have a laptop I can use if need be.

I originally went shopping for a nano, and was convinced in-store to give the Z5 4Gb a go instead. The main benefits I've like are the loooooong battery life, easy PC connection via the USB cord and being able to play MP3 files natively, without having to convert to Apple's music format. So file transfer is fast and simple, and the player is very compatible "out of the box" without having to add on iTunes or any kind of proprietory software.

The Z5 connects directly to Windows Media Player, so I can set up sync lists. The interface this way is a little cumbersome though, and the sync can be a little tedious for deleting files -- and you need to have good tags in your MP3 files to have albums sorted correctly (although I doubt that is a negative against the player -- it's only reading the available data!). But you can access the player's files without Windows Media Player, directly from Windows Explorer, so that's an added bonus.

The navigation can be slightly over-sensitive at times, it's easy to scroll past an item in the window, but doesn't take long to get used to. The player switches off the screen pretty quickly, which helps prolong battery life. And I can easily scroll through my songs whilst another song is playing, easy to setup the next song to play if I'm looking through all 600-plus songs on the player. Easy too to hook up an FM transmitter to the headphone jack to play songs through the car radio.

It also has a picture viewer but I don't see the point of it: it's not video and the screen isn't that big to enjoy too much picture viewing. But then again, I don't think any small screen size devices really lend themselves to extended or frequent picture viewing. I'm sure others have their own opinion, so if a picture viewer is appealing, there's one here.

Overall, it's a bit bulkier than the nano, but still small overall and doesn't feel at all flimsy, so likely to avoid scratches and should last well in the long term. Recharging is simple via USB. Not the range of expensive add-on products as iPod, but that's not why I bought the player: it has been a reliable MP3 music player and I'd happily recommend it to friends.

I'm nearly tempted to only give it 4 stars because of the navigation being a bit sensitive, but I don't think it warrants a full star downgrade. Probably 4.5 stars, but happy to say 5 in this case.

The only reason I'd get rid of the player is for a video based player (ideally with SD card slot to store camera pics) of about 80Gb or more -- but that's really a different category of need -- this is great for music!

The one I received as a gift never worked. I sent it in for repairs twice, and twice it was returned with the same problem. Customer service promised to contact me with some sort of resolution. Nope. When I called back a week later, nothing had been done to get me an exchange or a refund. Apparently, my case wasn't even forwarded yet to the department who could authorize any decision. I'm still waiting. Do yourself a favor and check out the better business bureau's report on Samsung Electronics, Ridgefield Park, NJ BEFORE buying an MP3 player from them. The vast majority of complaints are either unresolved or not responded to.

I bought it because it had the 2 features I found important-long battery life and durable for use out hiking/camping etc. The general view has been that the controls take some getting used to-I agree and wish I could have tried it before buying it. Also, I had an easier time putting music on my moms cheapo $30 MP3 player then I did with this one. Sound quality is good, havent used it enough yet to say much else. My biggest issue is not the product itself but the company. Samsung reps are RUDE. I called to inquire about a car adapter (unlike IPODs there are no "YP-Z5" accessiories) and was told that if I didnt have a cd player in my car I was out of luck. When I asked if there wasnt ANY adapter I could use since I dont have a cd player-the rep interupted me saying "listen lady" and "most new cars today have cd players" he ended up hanging up on me. In all, I am soured by the experience and will never order a Samsung product again.

I own two of these....a 1gb and a 4gb. Great battery life, Easy to transfer music to from windows media player, solid casing that does not scatch easily, cost...available on ebay for Less than $125. It's a excellent unit and I love mine. Never had any problems with either.

I needed a replacement after going through 2 third gen ipod 20gb and a fourth gen (non color) 20gb it was time for a new mp3 player. I never liked iPods, all the iPods i got were given to me (some broken and had to have parts replaced) and they weren't really durable and had short battery life (even with battery upgrade). I did a lot of researching, looking at Samsung models and Scandisk models and Creative models. Price range was under $200 dollars. Now I remembered this mp3 player when it first came out and the features on it were good to me. And i looked at other samsung mp3 players and this one had the best set of features that i wanted (i could've wanted a recorder and fm receiver but oh well) and it looked decent.

So I get this in the mail (don't order on friday... it takes forever, i missed my chance to get the 90 day warranty, you have to register in 10 days, well i didn't have internet when it came so i couldn't register and didn't know it was 10 days until the next day)

Windows Media Player locked up the first and second time I tried to sync with it. Later realizing I had all these playlists, I cleared them and copied what I wanted. (it automatically syncs all playlist, i think this is a bit inconvient and i had to delete all of my playlist for that reason)

that was my first only issue. I updated the firmware and that really gave the samsung the features i didn't know i wanted. For example, the new firmware you can create your on EQ on the mp3 player, which is convienient and a hassle, like ipod you can create playlist on the go but you can't highlight albums or artist, but single songs at a time. the playlist don't save (at least i haven't figured out how yet).

a cool feature on it is when you click on a song and it has different artists in that album and you go back to the main menu (say to change EQ or something) well when you go back through you can either go through artists and it'll be highlighted or you can go back to the album. ipods it's the same place. it's convieent when you have the same artist and you want to listen to more of it rather then continue in that perticular album.mixtape.

battery life is good, it's only died on me once and i didn't charge it for 3 days and over used it on a hike so it was understandable it died. i did need to look at the time (didn't have any other means to see time) but all it would say is low battery (no split second main menu) so that kind of sucks.

overall features, compared to a nano, it's good, it's missing stuff like games and calender and what not, i don't think there is an alarm. but it has custom eq and unique go back to song, and has really really good battery life. the headphones that came with it are so much better then ipod nano headphones though i'm buying a pair of dj headphones to hear all the bass.

windows media player sucks, it's very glitchy and really restrictive. i haven't figured out how to delete songs and i mistakenly put two copies of the same album. the file formats is okie, though you have no options on uncompressed files. on top of that for some reason it needs to convert mp3 songs again. i don't know why. m4a doesn't work of course, nor does it convert.

windows media player is probably the bottleneck of this product.

oh you can also run it in UMA (i think that's what it's called) which means u can use it as a flash drive and it shows up as a drive, rather then mp3 player. i haven't copied songs this way, but if i can i'm going to try my mac os on it.

oh it's windows only but if it works on coping songs this way and being able to put it in it's library, we have something that competes ipods.

that's what mp3 player compaines should do. something that works on both mac os and windows.

Product features 4/5
Battery life 10/5 more then 35 hrs on mine
looks 4/5
sound quality 4.5/5
transfer music 2/5

I really didn't want to get a Nano so I looked for alternatives. I was about to get the Creative Zen V Plus but then I got this as a gift. I didn't even know this player existed since it really isn't marketed well by Samsung. Overall I am very happy with it. The battery life is amazing and the controls are easy to use once you get used to them. I had no problems transferring songs using Windows Media player. I think the one drawback I can think of is that there isn't much accessories for it. I was able to find a case eventually.

This model has not as comfortable menu than the other model that I had befor. After using it for a month it started to freeze. I called customer service and they said it was a common problem....

This thing broke after 2 months. The real nightmare is the Samsung support. I had to send it in twice for repairs and twice it came back DOA. To add more stress, Samsung Service did not perform as change of address, despite a dedicated call I made to them for this purpose only. They sent it back the second time to the old address. I own several Samsung products (HDTV, DVD PLAYERS), which have turned out to be mediocre in quality and performance. I will never buy Samsung again.From now on, any electronics I buy will be bought locally and with extended warranties.

I really want this player but it doesn't have a fully customizable equalizer like some of Samsung's previous models do. Its a shame really, because I like the player in other ways. Some others have hoped there would be a firmware update to add this features but its been almost a year and several updates and still no improvement on the equalizer.

If you dont mind this one flaw, dont let this stop you from getting this player.