The Lexar LDP-200 is a basic, cut-price MP3 player that does its job, but we recommend spending a little more money and getting a higher-quality product with fewer flaws.

The best feature of the LDP-200 is its Secure Digital card slot, which enables the user to expand the memory simply by changing the card (or to have several music collections of different cards). This is a significant feature for a flash-based player, as most other models on the market have fixed, non-expandable memory. The SD card fits into a slot on the left-hand side of the LDP-200 and is easily accessible. One problem we had with the card slot is that it sticks noticeably out of its slot, even when fully inserted. It should also be noted that the unit has no internal memory on the device--you must use an SD card.

The design of the LDP-200 is fairly simple, and although the unit is a low-end model, we can't help but feel it looks too cheap for our liking. The red plastic finish attracts fingerprints and the LDP-200 feels like it could break if we happened to drop it onto a hard surface. We also found the plastic rubber cover for the USB port on the right-hand side of the device didn't sit in its position properly.

The LDP-200 is let down by poor controls, including a flimsy five-way navigational joystick that is not nearly responsive enough. We had trouble changing the track countless times, as trying to move the joystick left or right often resulted in an accidental press of the Play/Pause button. Changing the volume sometimes bumped tracks back or forward, and the reverse happened when changing the tracks.

The interface of the LDP-200 is easy to get around, but we were disappointed with its clutter. It displays battery life, track title, music format and bit-rate information, volume, track number, current equaliser setting, track time and whether or not the current file is in play, stop or pause mode. Quite simply, there is too much information shown at once.

Navigating through the LDP-200 is a very slow process, and just changing tracks takes about 3 seconds. Because the menu only displays two lines of text, trying to quickly scroll through a selection to find a specific track is frustrating. A high point of the LDP-200 is its screen, which is bright, clear and fairly easy to read, even in direct sunlight.

Transferring songs from your PC to the unit is as easy as dropping and dragging files onto the player. There is no included software with the package and the LDP-200 can only play WMA and MP3 files. The sound quality of the unit was surprisingly above average--clean, crisp and with a generous amount of bass. The equalisation settings were disappointing as there are only five presets (normal, classical, rock, jazz and pop) with no custom equaliser available. Neither is there bass boost or 3D surround features.

The LDP-200 runs on a single standard AAA battery, which is useful if you travel frequently and don't always have access to power. During testing, the battery lasted approximately 13 hours, which is below average for a flash memory unit.