Creative Zen being too Creative (Creative Zen Vision:M 60 GB)

Member Name: Deru

Product:	Creative Zen Vision:M 60 GB
Date:	31/12/08 (230 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lots of storage, Works as mass storage device, Lots of features, Plays Video

Disadvantages: Requires software to upload music, Big and heavy

I bought myself a Creative Zen Vision M to listen to my music collection. I chose this player due to the large storage capacity and video capabilities as well as the built-in FM radio tuner. Mine is the 60GB version, but the 30GB version is also available in a slightly smaller body. The player has a black front and a white back and doesn't look quite elegant. It has four buttons, each with an icon that glows a nice blue colour when pressed. Something unusual is that it has a vertical touch pad for navigation. I bought mine for £160 at the time when it first came out (60GB version) but the 30GB version seems to be selling for just over £100 on eBay.

USING AND NAVIGATION

Loading songs requires the software to be installed on a PC first. This is very annoying as I prefer to just plug the player into any random PC just to drag my music and videos into a 'Removable Drive'. The player can be used to store documents but it needs to be set up on the player itself first. This involves allocating half the players capacity for 'Mass Storage'. This means that 30GB is for storage only, which is fine so long as your music collection doesn't fill the first half of the 60GB.

I've always found the navigation on the Vision M to be very unpleasant compared to that of other MP3 players. It has the buttons but the main navigation tool is the vertical touch pad. It doubles as a Left and Right button but to scroll through a long list of music feels very tedious because you have to let go once you've moved your thumb to the bottom of the pad to move to the top to repeat the scrolling procedure, whereas with an iPod (Classic / Nano), you can keep going round and round the Click Wheel. With it feeling tedious aside, it's also very easy to miss the items you want because it doesn't give me as much control as a 'navigation wheel' or a button would. With this in mind, I don't like the navigation facility found on this player. Navigating via the buttons is fine but choosing songs becomes a pain, especially if you have a big music collection.

The way the player sorts the songs is pretty annoying too. It does give me many different filters in which the music is sorted, such as by artist, by rating, alphabetical order but it doesn't seem to pick up folders so it just jumbles everything up despite having copied folders in. I find it very tricky to create a playlist on the player itself but one can be create via the computer.


BATTERY LIFE

The battery life usually lasts me around a day but with on and off usage, which I feel is satisfactory but there are players with more stamina these days. As the player has a 2.5" colour screen, the more I navigate around i.e. skip songs, watch videos, etc, the quicker the battery is drained but the battery and brightness settings can be adjusted. Either way, battery life isn't bad.


SOUND QUALITY

The sound quality is excellent but obviously, it also depends on what headphones you use. I've never used the standard headphones that it came with but with a good quality set of Sony headphones, the sound quality is as good as any iPod or rival MP3 player of the same calibre.


VIDEO PLAYBACK

The player has video playing capabilities but I've found it to be quite limited on what videos it can play. I've found that a lot of my AVI video files won't play unless I re-encode / convert them using a third party software so that the video resolution is shrunk right down to match the Vision M's screen resolution. I used PocketDivX to do it and the time it takes to do this depends on the video size, length, computer speed, etc. My 100-150MB AVI files on my pretty decent PC takes 5-10 minutes for each video to be converted so that they would play on the Vision M. It'd be much better if it can just play whatever files I copy to the player without having to do any converting. Once on the player and playing, the screen is quite small so just staring at the screen for 15 minutes makes my eyes tired.



ACCESSORIES

It comes with some very standard headphones, much like most other mp3 players and a data cable. It has the ability to play the video on the player on a TV but it requires an adapter, which needs to be purchased separately. It does come with a beige suede bag to carry it around in but this case is not very good for when using the player when out and about. I need to take the player out of the bag each time I want to do something on it so it is inconvenient. Lastly, it came with a cloth the clean the player with.



VERDICT

It's a high specification player but the annoying navigation takes a lot of getting used to and I feel going for a different brand or just a different Creative model would be a better option. It's not great as a video player unless you don't mind having to convert your videos each time or only have an occasional video you want to put on the player. The screen is pretty small but that is the price to pay for having something portable that can fit in your pocket. Still okay for the odd video to watch on the train. The need to install the software before you can transfer music and videos to the player is a trivial matter as iPod users also need to install software before they can upload their music so it's not a big issue. I don't recommend this player as there are plenty of others on the market and I've since bought myself a SanDisk Sansa.

The player itself is not the smallest in the world, nor is it the lightest so if you're after something small and light, this definitely isn't the player for you. If you want something just for music, then this is overkill so again, I'd recommend looking elsewhere. If you're not fussed about having to install software before being able to upload songs, then go for an iPod (for the better navigation). Alternatively, if you don't like iPods, and want to be able to drag and drop music into the player as well as to use the player as a flash drive, take a look at the SanDisk and iRiver players.


Thanks for reading

* Posted on Ciao under same name

Summary: Navigation lets it down

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