Digital Trends

Samsung YH-820

June 22nd, 2005 | by Ian Bell

Setup and Use

Samsung includes a very detailed manual that shows how to use the YH-820 with your PC, the Samsung software, and Napster. One thing the manual does not do a good job of explaining is how to use the YH-820 with Windows Media Player 10. But fear not, because this little player does support Microsoft's PlaysForSure, a Windows Media transfer protocol. So you can opt to just install the Samsung drivers and use Windows Media Player 10 to transfer music to your YH-820; and that's what we recommend.

It's not that the Samsung Music Studio is bad, but it's redundant software and transfer speeds are slower than if you used WMP 10. One word of advice though; WMP 10 is setup to convert songs to the WMA format by default, and this can slow down your transfer time. If you go into the WMP 10 options, you can turn this off which will speed things up considerably when transferring MP3s.

Using the YH-820 as a mass storage device is nice, but it will not work with music files. You either have to use the Samsung software or WMP 10, which is a major bummer. But at least you can store regular files on the YH-820; it's better than nothing.

When powering up the YH-820, the whole start-up process is painfully slow. It literally takes 25 seconds from hitting the power button to when you can start playing music, and there is no excuse for this. And while navigation and menu layout is very simple to use, we experienced considerable lag while browsing through the interface. It's not like the YH-820 is bulging with features to slow it down, so it appears to just be a case of bad programming. Hopefully a firmware download can fix this in a future update.

Performance

The ear buds that come with the YH-820 actually sound much better than they look. The player itself is made up of metal alloy and white plastic, so it's beyond us why Samsung opted to go with grey ear buds. The cable attached to the ear buds is also very thin and “clingy” which causes them to get tangled up very easily if you are not careful. We found ourselves constantly untangling these things — a major pain in the butt. But at least they sound good.

There are nine total equalizer settings to choose from including SRS, WOW and Trubass which help to give special effects to the music you are listening too. Electronica fans will be particularly happy with the Trubass setting which gives a noticeable bass boost to the music. The ear buds are better sounding than most of the ones included with MP3 players and should be fine for most people. Audiophiles should also have no problem using their own cans with the YH-820. We did not notice distortion at the higher volumes, but the player could be louder.

Compared to the iRiver H10, the YH-820 is better sounding out of the box, but if you were to use your own headphones, they both would be equally good, although the H10 can support higher volume levels.

The picture viewer on the YH-820 is very basic. Once you have your images transferred over to the device, you can browse them in a slideshow format. The 1.5-inch screen is not as large as the iRiver H10 or the iPod photo so it can be difficult to see. We love how you can output images to a television using an iPod photo and would love to see this implemented in the smaller players but no one has done this yet, including Samsung. The picture viewer really is nothing more than a novelty at this point.