Creative Zen Vision:M

Creative Zen players have always giving a strong competition to the iPod family. Creative Zen Vision:M promises to do the same and more. The Creative Zen Vision series is aimed at users who want to carry their entire music collection with them. They combine style and performance to fulfill every need of a music listener.

Here are its specs:

• Dimensions: 2.4 x 0.7 x4.1 ” (W x D x H)
• Weight : 5.7 oz
• Storage : 30 GB
• Voice Recording, Radio
• Audio formats supported : MP3, WAV, WMA, ADPCM, Protected WMA (DRM)
• Video formats supported : DivX 4, DivX 5, XviD5, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WMV9, MPEG
• Image formats supported : JPEG,BMP,GIF,TIFF
• 2.5″ Display with 320 x 240 resolution

These are some of the major specifications of the Creative Zen Vision:M but there are a lot of other features. Coming to the most impressive part of the player is it screen. The 2.5″ screen is just amazing and displays colors vividly and excellent contrast and brightness. The brightness can also be changed manually but the viewing angle is not good.

Navigation buttons provided below the screen are not as good as the iPod.The 4 buttons and the touchpad provide you with the navigations features that you require to move through its menus or while browsing songs.Creative needs to do more work on them in its future versions.

The player plays almost all the popular audio/video formats and hence you will have to waste less or virtually no time in converting your audio/music collection.The player starts up quickly and so is it performance.It manages to play files quickly without making you to wait too much. Video playback is smooth but you do find few dropped frames now and then. The audio is great with bass,treble and vocals all sounding good even with the bundled earphones but you won’t regret spending on a better pair of earphones.

The radio is clear and loud with reception quality being good and it can store upto 32 channels.The pictures are scaled to its native QVGA resolution to fit its screen but can be zoomed to display them in full glory.The battery life is about 4 hours for video and 12 hours for music playback under optimal settings.Syncing options though are available for Windows XP only.

Pros:

• Brilliant Display
• FM tuner,voice recorder
• Good battery life
• Vast range of audio/video codecs supported

Cons:

• Average navigation buttons
• No OS X support
• Bad viewing angle

Final Thoughts

Creative Zen Vision:M manages to keep most of the promises that it makes but does leave room for improvements which can hamper its sales against the iPod.But lets not take the credit away from it.It has an excellent display which will make movie watching a pleasure and so is it audio quality.Hence it is a strong competitor against the iPod Video but might lose against the iPod Touch in my opinion.