Sony Walkman NWZ-E454: Could Have Done So Much Better

The NWZ-E454 came out in November last year and people waiting for a solid PMP must have kept their hopes high. Looking at the A845 or the W252, my expectations for this was pretty high, but I feel there’s something holding it back from being a great device.

Design and Features
The NWZ-E454 is built really well, but that shouldn’t be surprising in the first place. The player has a glossy front panel with a matte finish at the back. Let’s take a look at the physical aspects of the E454.

Neat and tidy

The display screen is a 2-inch QVGA LCD Display and accommodates 262k colors at a 240 x 320 pixel resolution and is an absolute smudge magnet. The button layout is quite similar to that of the A845, i.e. a four-way rounded keypad with a play/pause button in the middle. Just a little at the top-left of the keypad is the back/home button while on the right is a option/power button. On the right side of the player there’s a hold switch and volume controls at the top. Finally below the player, you’ll find the 3.5 mm audio jack and Sony’s proprietary WM port.

Coming to the formats that the E454 supports, it’s almost a crime that there’s no FLAC support or even AVI support for audio and video files respectively. While it does support MP3, WMA, AAC-LC for audio, video formats are AVC (H.264/AVC), MPEG-4, Windows Media Video 9 and AAC-LC. The player has 5 EQ presets and 2 custom presets and there are other sound enhancement settings like Dynamic Equalizer, Virtualphones Technology and others.

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The ports and buttons sit pretty

The player holds 8 GB of media and is bundled with a proprietary cable, earphones and an attachment to support the player while it charges.

All that said, the player is designed and finished well but coming to the earphones, they disappoint in the fact that they are plain ear-buds and not in-ear monitors. Also, the build of the earphones is very average with the wire’s plastic being soft and thus getting entangled easily.

Nicely built and finished well

Performance
After a solid design, we are looking for a solid performance but do we get to see that? Let’s find out whether the E454 plays loud and strong.

Still pictures could have looked better

With all those equalizer settings and more options for sound enhancement, the E454 is one PMP that sounds really good and manages to do so even on default. While the highs and lows are very nice and clear, the mids are pretty decent too. While it was easier to hear the vocals, somehow the drums felt a little low. Some slighter details in a song might possibly go unnoticed, but you can tweak those with the wide range of audio settings.
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The E454 is very average when it comes to video playback. The display of the player looks as if it has a film over the screen, although it could have been a problem with the test piece. Video playback lags a bit and there’s a certain amount of pixelation. Overall, watching videos on this player isn’t very overwhelming.

Watch 5 football matches non-stop!

One good aspect of the E454 is its battery life. It can go for about 43 hours while playing audio and for around 8 and a half hours of video, which is very good.

The performance of this PMP goes slightly over the Plain Jane level, so although it’s not the best, apart from average video quality there’s not much to complain about either.

That’s it for now, sleep well my friend

Verdict
Coming to the conclusion, I really wanted to rate this player highly but then thinking about the lack of FLAC or AVI format support, average video performance, standard bundled ear buds; it doesn’t deserve a high recommendation. At Rs. 6990, it’s not overpriced but you can always go for something better like the Zen X-Fi Style.