Creative Zen Vision: M Reviewer's Comments
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Take your show on the road with Creative's ZEN Vision: M. This petite player offers full-size entertainment, including the ability to play music, video, slideshows, FM radio and more. It is compatible with scores of download services and works with popular file types so conversions are rarely needed.
Unfortunately, Creative is falling behind in the MP3 player race. iPod Classic is offering more storage at a better price and although we feel the Vision: M has a better feature set people are usually drawn to the better value.
Features:
This portable comes in a 60GB and 30GB size in a variety of colors. It can play music, display video and images and record voice. Unlike the iPod, this player enables you to customize backgrounds, menu options and short cuts. The ZEN Vision: M has a unique feature that allows you to partition or divide the hard drive so you can designate certain amounts of memory for specific uses. So, for example, you could set a section aside to be used as a portable hard drive for data files.
The ZEN Vision: M comes with earphones, a sync adapter, a USB Mini-B Cable, a protective pouch, installation CD and a Quick Start GuideMusic Formats:
The Vision: M is compatible with mp3, wma and wav formats. Since most music files come in these formats, this player can download thousands of audio files, rarely needing file conversion.
Creative's optional accessories include wired remotes, an FM transmitter, a cassette adapter, speakers, a leather case, a variety of headphones including noise canceling headphones and more.
Picture Formats:
Technically, Creative's player technically only supports jpg images; however, the software bundled with the player includes the ability to transcode gif, bmp and tiff files.
This player has the ability to create and display slideshows with music. You could, for example, create an interesting or fun background for your music selection and connect it to your television for parties, or display family pics with music at your next family gathering.Video Formats:
The Vision: M is compatible with mpeg (1/2/4-SP), wmv9, xvid, divx (4/5) and motion-jpeg. If you like to use Windows Media this player is for you; if you prefer QuickTime you may want to consider an iPod.
A good add-on for this player is the video cable for $18.99. With this cable you can hook your portable up to a television for large screen viewing.
Physical Features:
The ZEN Vision: M is 2.4 x 4.1 x .7 inches and weighs less than 6 ounces making it easily portable. It has a 2.5-inch screen with more color display ability than the iPod and has excellent sound quality with a signal to noise ratio of 97db.
The battery lasts for about 17 hours playing music and four hours playing video; it can fully recharge by USB in 6.5 hours or 2.5 hours with an adapter. The adapter costs an extra $29.99-39.99 and the car charger is $29.99.
This player comes in five colors: black, white, green, pink and blue.
Help/Support:
One of the main factors in Creative's ZEN frequently topping our list is the excellent support. You can contact them by telephone or email and they post extensive information online including tutorials, downloads, user forums, product documentation and more. When we sent an email to Creative, they responded quickly and answered all of our questions courteously.
Summary:
We find that Creative has consistently developed well-designed products loaded with useful features. However, with only 60 GB of storage we feel many people are willing to spend the extra 50 bucks and get the iPod Classic with 160 GB of memory. We love ZEN, but they need to step up their game to keep up with iPod.
©2008 TopTenREVIEWS, Inc.
