I chose the Panasonic SJ-MJ50, since it was very small, very sleek, and came with a very unique charging cradle. Panasonic has always made quality products, and the MJ50 is no exception.
The unit itself comes in three different colors, blue, red, and silver.
I have a silver unit, I decided against the other colors since the other colors were on the faceplate only, and it appeared that they weren't metal.
The unit is 13.7 mm thick, 72.2 mm long, and 79.9 mm wide. I love the simplicity of the player's design.
It has a
slot-loading mechanism, which is more of a slot-clamshell mix.
It basically has a lid that tilts when pushed back, which sends the
disc upward, opening the clamshell.
It works pretty nicely, but it may have problems with
discs that have warped/bent shutters, but only while ejecting.
The disc is ejected using a small lever on the side of the unit, or, you can manually lift up the lid. The lid is transparent, so you can see the spine label of the disc, which I thought was pretty neat.
Also, whenever you press the eject lever, or close the lid, a bright
blue light will illuminate the transparent disc lid. This helps disc loading when you're in the dark, which is nice. The lid will illuminate when you press buttons on the remote or the unit as well.
The volume buttons are located on the right side of the unit; it’s basically a rocker switch for volume +/-.
The Play/Stop/Next track/Previous track buttons are on the back of the unit, the play/stop functions being assigned to one button.
The buttons are pretty standard but they’re a good size too. I don’t typically use the unit buttons, since I have the remote.
The SJ-MJ50 does not however have a pause button. To me, this is sort of annoying, but to a minimal degree, since the unit has
memory, so when you stop, it'll turn off, but when you press play it'll start from where you stopped.
The remote has a 5-function pad, which features volume, track selection, play, and stop.
Play/Stop is located in the centre. Volume +/- is located on the top/bottom, and Track Next/Prev is located on the left/right.
This design works very well.
The remote does have a group function, despite the lack of a labelled button.
When the unit is stopped, Next track and Previous track will cycle through groups. It’s a little different from the Group function found on some units, since it doesn’t reset the track number to 1, and that you can go to tracks in other groups after selecting a specific group. This is probably due to the fact that there is no way to toggle Group Mode. I don’t really have a problem with this.
Other miscellaneous details regarding the remote are that the faceplate of the remote is removable, and the back of the remote is composed of a see-through black plastic. The clip is the strongest I’ve seen on a remote, and I’m pretty sure that each colour unit comes with its respective faceplate colour. This is easily the best MD remote I’ve ever used.
The charger (dubbed “Sound Charger”) is a small box which extracts (I know that sounds weird, but I don’t want to say “fold” ‘cause it doesn’t fold) outward, creating an empty space between the two halves of the box.
The player itself can be placed in that space, and locked in, and the two halves of the box are speakers, creating a mini stereo. The remote can be connected on the side of the speakers, and you decide whether to use the buttons on the charger or the buttons on the remote using a small switch on the side of the right speaker. The left speaker has a jack for the AC adapter, and the external battery pack, which can be connected to both the charger and the unit alone.
I thought that was cool, since the player’s playtime is significantly reduced when using the speakers. The speakers can also function without the AC adapter, using the battery, but again, the playback time is greatly reduced (9.5 hours in LP1/LP2/LP4 modes, as opposed to 29 hours in LP1, 41 hours in LP2, and 48 hours in LP4).
I think that the unit will recharge while playing in the sound charger, provided the AC adapter is connected.
However, I don’t charge the unit that often, since the instructions (which come in both English and Japanese) say that the battery can be fully recharged only about 300 times.
I don’t know how accurate that is, but I’m going to assume it is, so I only recharge it when I need to, which I haven’t had to do yet. It’s occurred to me that 29 hours is a pretty long time.
The earphones are pretty good; they’re actually pretty nice compared to some of the other earphones I’ve seen.
They have a rubber coating on the earpiece, and sections of the rubber are removed to reveal a small metal grill.
It looks pretty slick.
The earphones are pretty loud, and they’re comfortable. They also have the remote-friendly short cord. However, I’m not too good how they compare to other earphones as I don’t have any other ones to compare them with. But they are brilliant to me!
The sound quality of the SJ-MJ50 is very good.
It may not be as loud as it could be, but it certainly isn’t quiet, or not loud enough.
The X-Bass settings are very effective, the bass is REALLY boomy, and it’s probably better than my hi-fi!
Overall, I think this is an excellent unit; it’s small, functional and beautiful.
It’s fairly cheap too…I bought it for £84.95 from the Richer Sounds website.
I recommend this unit to anyone looking for a
MD player. It truly is a bargain!
Thumbs up to Panasonic!!
Panasonic have done it again... 
Very informative review. Lynne x