Sandisk Sansa c250 review

The prices of Flash memory are in free fall at the moment, so too are prices for MP3 players that utilise it.

At £50, the Sansa c250 isn't the most affordable 2GB player around, but it is around half the price of the market leaders from Apple and iRiver, and includes an FM radio and voice recorder function.

A MicroSD slot means you can upgrade the capacity by up to 2GB with MicroSD cards - and doing so will cost you just £20. A colour screen displays photos and album artwork, but its coarse resolution and flat colours mean that images are barely recognisable. Still, it's perfectly fine for adjusting settings and browsing tracks, and the menu and controls are easy to use.

Compared to the very best, the Sansa c250's battery life is a little below par, lasting 13 and a half hours in our test. As is now pretty much standard among MP3 players, charging is via USB only and there's no mains charger supplied. But the battery can be easily replaced if it should begin to perform badly a year or two down the line. USB transfers are slow at 2MB/s, but we appreciate the player's Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) compliance, which means that transfers are elegantly handled by Windows Media Player.

Perhaps it's unfair to expect great in-ear headphones with such an affordable player. Sure enough they aren't great, but they are far from terrible. There's a reasonable amount of bass, but plugging in a superior pair gave a much smoother, fuller sound. The player suffers much the same fate, with a slight lack of focus and clarity compared to the best players around. Things got particularly bad when attempting to boost the bass using the Custom EQ setting, resulting in rasping distortion. At least the EQ presets sensibly stick to cutting rather than boosting frequencies to avoid the problem.

The Sansa c250 is a low-cost MP3 player that fails to perform any better than we'd expect at this price. If your budget is fixed then it shouldn't disappoint, but we'd recommend spending a little more if you want better sound quality.