Product Description

The NW-S618FBLACK Walkman Video MP3 player combines a powerful digital music player with a 1.8" QVGA LCD screen9 for hours of multimedia entertainment. The elegant black 8GB1 player weighs less than 2 ounces yet provides the capacity to store more than 4,500 songs2. A built-in FM tuner lets you listen to your favorite radio stations, or use the LCD screen to play back hours of high-quality video or view JPEG photo images. Slim and stylish, the NWZ-S618FBLACK is the perfect MP3 player for your mobile multimedia lifestyle.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35255 in Consumer Electronics
• Color: BLACK
• Brand: Sony
• Model: NWZS618FBLK
• Dimensions: 6.58" h x 5.75" w x 1.42" l, .11 pounds
• Display size: 1.8

Features

• High quality video playback at 30 frames per second
• Up to 33 Hours of Battery Life
• 1.8" QVGA LCD Screen
• Compatible with Secure Windows Media Audio
• FM Tuner with 30 Station Presets

Amazon.com Product Description
Slim and stylish, the NWZ-S618FBLK Walkman Video MP3 player combines a powerful digital music player with a 1.8" QVGA LCD screen for hours of multimedia entertainment. Listen to your favorite songs, view videos and photographs or listen to your favorite radio stations. Weighing less than 2 ounces but with the capacity to store up to 4,500 songs, 8 hours of video or hundreds of photographs, the 8GB NWZ-S618FBLK Walkman Video MP3 player delivers everything you need to take your favorite entertainment with you.

8GB Built-in Memory
Store up to 5,050 songs or up to 30H 40M of video on your Walkman Video MP3 player and never be without your entertainment again.

High Quality Video Playback
Playback your favorite videos right on the player using MPEG 4 and M4V profile at 30 frames per second.

Battery Life
With up to 33 hours of audio playback and up to 8 hours of video playback you don't have to worry about charging your player.

1.8" QVGA LCD Screen
Easily view your movies, photos and music information on the high quality, 320x240 display.

Compatible with Secure Windows Media Audio
Giving you more options than ever for downloading and listening to music.

MP3/WMA/AAC Audio Codec Support
Supports playback of MP3 and WMA DRM and non-DRM audio files downloaded from multiple sources. Will also support AAC non-DRM content, giving you multiple options for downloading music the way you want.

3 Clear Audio Technologies
Utilizes 3 Clear Audio Technologies to reproduce crystal clear, CD-quality audio.

• Digital Sound Enhancement Engine (DSEE) restores the higher sound frequency lost when creating compressed music files.
• Clear Bass enhances the bass sound while minimizing distortion.
• Clear Stereo reduces signal leakage from one channel to another.

FM Tuner with 30 Station Presets
Allows you to preset and listen to your favorite radio stations while on the go.

Time Machine Shuffle
Shuffle play among songs from a randomly selected year. (Information will come from CD information that is downloaded from the Gracenote CDDB)

Initial Search
Use the first letter of the song, album or artist to easily find the music you are looking for.

Bi-Directional LCD Display
Watch your videos and view your photographs either vertically or horizontally by adjusting the screen to the orientation you prefer.

What's in the Box
NWZ-S618FBLK Walkman Video MP3 player, USB Cable (22 pin to USB), MDR-E804LP Headphones and extension cord, CD-ROM with Windows Media Player 11 and MP3 Conversion Tools, Quick Start Guide.

Customer Reviews

I like this player a lot
I purchased this player as well as the NWZ-A818 recently because I wasn't sure which one I liked the best. In the end I chose this player because I liked the form factor better. This player looks more solid and less flimsy than the 818 in my opinion. It's smaller and it has a built-in FM radio which the 818 doesn't have. Aside from that, the two players seem to be identical. i.e. they have all the same EQs and other features. However, the one thing that really puts the 818 ahead of this player when you look at the package as a whole is the head phones. The head phones on this player are pretty terrible. They are pretty much the equivalent of the $9 Sony headphones that you can buy separately. You'll probably want to replace them with at least some MDR-EX51s. Even the though the MDR-EX82s that come with the 818 are smaller, they seemed to have better clarity than the much larger MDR-V6 studio monitor headphones that I have. The mids and highs seemd better than EX51s and they didn't have the cheap cabling that EX51s have. MDR-EX82s aren't sold separately to my knowledge, but, I'm pretty sure they are the same as the EX85s and those sell for about $55 at the moment. So, value-wise and out of the box sound-wise, the 818 is probably the better choice unless you want the radio and you are picky about the size and form factor like I am. One other difference that I noticed between this player and the 818 is that although the 818s screen is larger, the screen on this one looks a lot better. It's noticeably brighter and better looking no matter what the brightness settings are on.

The good:
Very small and light
Finish looks fairly scratch resistant
Simple design that looks durable
Long battery life
You don't have to install any special drivers on Windows XP (although you may have to install Windows Media Player 11)
Screen is very bright
The user interface is intuitive and easy to use, for example, you can easily change EQ settings
Good sound quality, has lots sound adjustment settings
Has several EQ settings and two custom ones
The UI is very responsive
Skipping from one track to the next is fast, probably faster than a hard drive based player

The average:
File transfer speed, I thought it would be faster than the hard drive based Rio Carbon 5 GB that I was using previously, but, it seems only marginally better

The bad:
Cheap head phones, if they included the EX82s instead, this review would be a 5/5 instead
Price could be a bit lower considering you can get a 30 GB hard drive based player for close to the same amount of money
Proprietary connector designed to make you buy Sony cables when they could have just used a normal USB connector
USB charging doesn't seem to work with a USB charger adaptor, you need Sony's expensive one
Uses MTP not USB mass storage, doesn't have a drive letter associated with it, so, you can't copy files to it using the Command Prompt, but, it does work nicely from Explorer
Not sure if it can be used (unofficially) on platforms other than Windows
I don't like the way the right and left buttons work when scrolling through artists, it should jump a page at a time IMHO, rather than dividing things up into alphabetic ranges
It doesn't seem to show thumbnail images of images that you put on it
It doesn't recognize directories beyond one level deep for images, not sure if this applies to music or not
For me the amount of storage is still a little low, a 16 GB model would probably store virtually all the music that I listen to on a regular basis
It might be nice if you could delete files from the player itself rather than having to use a computer

Overall, I would definitely recommend this player, but, I'd recommend getting some better headphones after the fact if you don't already have some. Most of what I have listed above under the bad is just me nitpicking.

A Great Little Video MPEG3 Player
The first thing that pleasantly suprised me when this product arrived was that it is SMALL. The face of the player is signifigantly smaller than the area of a credit card in both length and width and is the approximate depth of a zippo lighter. the screen is bright, colorful, and sharp, though it is a little small for the purposes of video and photos. the interface is very earsy for navigation and it includes a radio tuner. For the faithful Sony customers and the SonicStage sceptics; you may or may not be happy to know that sony has abandoned it's SonicStage. All their players operate seamlessly with Jukeboxes such as Napster and Windows Media player. They also no longer play the ATRAC family of formats, but fear not SonicStage users; The device also comes with a program to change all your ATRACs to MP3s. And as always with sony players, battery life is outstanding, even considering the bright screen. This is a great player considering its price

Great Player and Great Radio
I have several MP3 Players including one of the 800 Series Sony Players. The main difference between the 600 series and the 800 series seems to be the lack of an FM Tuner on the 800's ( but better Headphones), and the 800 Series is thinner,longer and feels like it has a higher quality build,even though it is manufactured in CHINA, the 600's are made in Malaysia). They are both outstanding players, but you will need to upgrade the headphones on the 600s to experience the true potential of the player.


I used to sell audio euipment in a previous life, and I one thing I learned is that the interpretation of good sound is relative to the individual doing the listening and the musical material they listen too, and not always dependent on the equipment. After some of the hifi demos in the store, I have had people tell me they couldn't tell the difference between a 179.00 8 Track Stereo combo unit and 2,500.00 audio system.

That being said I did not believe all the reviews that talked about how good the sound is on this player. I figured some of it was just hype from people that hate Apple. I have $ 10.00 Generic MP3 players that sound as good as 250.00 players when using the right pair of Headphones.

I thought that was going to be the case here too. Using the right headphones, I expected this player to sound good, using the Sony MDR7502 Professional Studio Headphones, and the V-Moda Vibes. However, I was not prepared for how good this player sounded using the V-Moda earbuds.

I loaded 51 of my favorite songs on it the first day I got it, and proceeded to listen to all 51, until 3:00 am in the morning. I could not stop listening. I hear detail that I never heard before, and imaging that I would only expect to get using a pair of properly spaced speakers.

The volume levels on this player can potentially cause hearing loss and Sony includes a very prominent warning in the box. Using the V-Moda Earbuds, I listen at level of about 10 out of 30. The surprising thing about the Sony Player is that the it sounds just as good at 7 or 8 as it does as 17 or 20. There are pre set equalizer settings and two custom EQ settings. ( This is good if use use two different types of headphones)

I don't want to repeat everything that everyone else has already said, but the sound from this unit is awesome when you use a better pair of headphones than the ones included in the box.

Also, no one seemed to mention the FM Tuner in this unit. This unit has one of the most sensitve and musical tuners I have heard in any portable device. I have players from Creative,MPIO, I-River,Virgin and Sandisk, none of the tuners in those units have really great sound, the Creative probably had best tuner followed by IRiver, but again, none of them can top this Sony Tuner.

The sound of the tuner in this unit reminds me of the FM Tuners of the late 70's and Early 80's, when FM was a majaor source of musical entertainment and the sound quality was important. I can hear a lot of detail that other tuners just don't provide.

This player is so easy to navigate I think my 80 year old mother could probably use it with no problems.

Someone made a comment about the transfer speed not being very fast, but this is the fastest unit I have ever owned. Media Player 11 recognized the player right away, and I was able to move over 182 songs in under 15 minutes. ( Most of that time was picking which songs to move)

I might add, that you can drag and drop through Windows Explorer.

There is so much more I would like to say about this player but that would be repitious. I will say I wish Sony would have used a standard USB mini jack instead of the proprietary jack. The USB charging and lack of an adapter is not a problem, I expected that and most players come that way now. You can pick up USB Chargers for under 10.00 dollars almost anywhere now, however I took away one star for the proprietary connector thing.

Sony is on the right track and they are now making the players that some of us die hard music fans knew they could produce once they stopped trying to control the music rights. I cannot compare this unit to an I-Pod because I have never heard and IPOD, but you will not be disappointed with this player. If you can afford it, get at least the 8 GB model. You will want to load it up and listen a long time. The battery life is stated as 33 hours for music, I have used the player for about a week without charging but I don't know the cumulative run time.


One final note, there are not a lot of accessories for this player. I have yet to find a case other than the Sony Case offered on Amazon. If you are looking for music docks and other stuff, you won't find them yet. I thnk they will come. I did notice that the prices for these Sony players are tarting to go up rather than come down. That may be testament to how good they sound and more demand. I have seen several places online out of stock on this player.

We can only hope ...

Great Player..........

Update -5/08

Music docks for this unit are available at the Sony Style website and maybe here on Amazon. Battery life is excellent on this player. I took this player overseas with me and did not have to charge it for over a month. ( used it about 3 hours day, sometimes more)

Sony is also selling a new combo package of this unit and NC22- noise canceling headphones. That is a great combination and that is how I use this unit now. It is a great combo for travel by plane, bus or train.