-pete-
New Head-Fier
- Joined
- Apr 21, 2006
- Posts
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So I've recently bought a creative vision: m to replace my ageing rockboxed ipod 4g, I figured i might as well give some impressions for you lot to judge.
The phones were tested on my audio technica ATH-AD700's a decent mid-high range phone, tests were carried out in a quiet room with little ambiant noise.
First things first...
[size=x-large]Lets open the box!
[/size]
Thats the box, its pretty simple and a nice black colour
The bottom, showiing the other colours avalible
The back, complete with information overload
Slide the bottom box out and you get a nice white box to open
Crack that open and we have the player and headphones in a foam frame.
The headphones (I haven't even opened these yet :S)
The player, its taken the ipod route and is wrapped in plastic, the text gives instructions on how to use it
The rest of the crap in the box spread out, lots of manuals and leaflets
The USB cable that you use to charge it, notice the fat dongle on the end of it, that also has the plugs for a proper AC adapter and the AV leads that you use to connect it to a TV
[size=large]Size Comparisons[/size]
A few photos to compare the sizes with my old player
Side by side they're pretty much identical
Height wise they're pretty much the same too
The zen is a couple of milimeters thicker in depth and a tiny bit narrower in the middle.
In short, its a good size, a fair bit thicker than the modern ipods but not as wide, imho this means that you are less likely to crack the screen.
[size=x-large]Audio quality[/size]
I've done a number of comparisions of the accoustics of this player with the old ipod and well, i dunno how to say this other than its very similar, the sound is crisp and clear with my ADs, the mid to low range is a little bit more pronounced and a bit heavier maybe, there is a custom EQ in the menu that gives you a bit more control to make the sound as you like it, personally i think it sounds pretty much perfect without any fancy software tricks but you can play around should the urge take you.
I would have to say that you should just avoid the "bass booster" option, it'll muddy everything up but you knew that already right
[size=x-large]Build Quality[/size]
The unit feels very solid and well built, nothing clicks or creaks and you hold the unit, the buttons are a little stiff but more on that in a moment.
[size=x-large]Useability[/size]
The operation of the unit is very similar to anyone who has either a zen or ipod before, we have a scroll bar in the middle of the unit that you use to switch between tracks, the sensitivity takes a bit of getting used to as does the fact you can tap it to go deeper into the menus, think of it as a bad laptop touch pad and you'll be close to what to expect.
There are a couple of smaller buttons either side of the pad that you can use to look through alphabetically (i.e skip to all the artists beginning with "k" etc) this is useful because the pad isn't really accurate enough to scroll through a big list quickly. It took me 26.7 seconds to go from playing a song with the hold switch on, to get back to the menu, search through my list of artists, albums and select a track and start playing it, compare this to 19.1 for the ipod doing pretty much the same thing and you can see that it'll take some time to get used to the zen's controls. you can alter the sensitivity of the pad but it still isn't that great.
In addition there are four face buttons on the player, all backlite'd in a cool blue colour, here we have controls to play/pause, go backwards in menus, a button to add ratings (similar to the ipod) and list all songs in the current playlist - this button will also act as a shortcut to your favorite action when in the main menus - and finally a contextual button that will pull up a menu to skip through the track, get details (play counts, bitrate etc), remove (full albums or individual tracks) playback modes (shuffle, repeat etc) save as playlist and pull up all of the artists tracks. These buttons are a little too stiff imo and they make one handed operation a little more difficult that it perhaps could have being.
[size=x-large]Features[/size]
One of the big selling points of the zen is that it can play videos, I've had freinds with video ipods who are a little annoyed with the long winded encodeing options so kudos to the boys at creative for putting divx and wmv playback as standard, playback is smooth and the screen gives a good view of the action, I wouldn't really want to watch a full film on there but if you are someone who might - for example - watch last nights 24 on the train to work then it should do the job. It also has support for video podcasts but i have yet to try that out since you need to install creative own software for that which I have yet to do since I have just used windows media player 11 for the moment.
Another big advantage of this unit is the support for the microsoft "PlaysForSure" services such as napster and (in the US) yahoo! Using the napster software has automatically dropped all the tracks I downloaded from there onto the player without too much of a fuss, so you can use a combination of media player and napster without any problems.
In addition to this the zen will automatically pull your pictures from your "my pictures" folder, kinda annoying if you have alot of rubbish in there but you can delete what you don't want without too much hastle. Pictures look crisp and bright and full of detail, although if you want to setup a slide show you have to use a PC and the software supplied.
Oh and it has an FM tuner which can pick up local and national radio stations, its not great but its there should none of your 30 gigs of tunes take your fancy. There is also a mic too, possibly useful for students taking lecture notes
So there you go, a good little player, reasonable size, reasonable price, a load of features, a great screen which is let down by some slightly iffy controls, sound quality is great but not much better than most other player.
Overall I'll give this player
[size=x-large]
8.8/10[/size]
Great player, iffy controls just knock it down a little
The phones were tested on my audio technica ATH-AD700's a decent mid-high range phone, tests were carried out in a quiet room with little ambiant noise.
First things first...
[size=x-large]Lets open the box!
[/size]
Thats the box, its pretty simple and a nice black colour
The bottom, showiing the other colours avalible
The back, complete with information overload
Slide the bottom box out and you get a nice white box to open
Crack that open and we have the player and headphones in a foam frame.
The headphones (I haven't even opened these yet :S)
The player, its taken the ipod route and is wrapped in plastic, the text gives instructions on how to use it
The rest of the crap in the box spread out, lots of manuals and leaflets
The USB cable that you use to charge it, notice the fat dongle on the end of it, that also has the plugs for a proper AC adapter and the AV leads that you use to connect it to a TV
[size=large]Size Comparisons[/size]
A few photos to compare the sizes with my old player
Side by side they're pretty much identical
Height wise they're pretty much the same too
The zen is a couple of milimeters thicker in depth and a tiny bit narrower in the middle.
In short, its a good size, a fair bit thicker than the modern ipods but not as wide, imho this means that you are less likely to crack the screen.
[size=x-large]Audio quality[/size]
I've done a number of comparisions of the accoustics of this player with the old ipod and well, i dunno how to say this other than its very similar, the sound is crisp and clear with my ADs, the mid to low range is a little bit more pronounced and a bit heavier maybe, there is a custom EQ in the menu that gives you a bit more control to make the sound as you like it, personally i think it sounds pretty much perfect without any fancy software tricks but you can play around should the urge take you.
I would have to say that you should just avoid the "bass booster" option, it'll muddy everything up but you knew that already right
[size=x-large]Build Quality[/size]
The unit feels very solid and well built, nothing clicks or creaks and you hold the unit, the buttons are a little stiff but more on that in a moment.
[size=x-large]Useability[/size]
The operation of the unit is very similar to anyone who has either a zen or ipod before, we have a scroll bar in the middle of the unit that you use to switch between tracks, the sensitivity takes a bit of getting used to as does the fact you can tap it to go deeper into the menus, think of it as a bad laptop touch pad and you'll be close to what to expect.
There are a couple of smaller buttons either side of the pad that you can use to look through alphabetically (i.e skip to all the artists beginning with "k" etc) this is useful because the pad isn't really accurate enough to scroll through a big list quickly. It took me 26.7 seconds to go from playing a song with the hold switch on, to get back to the menu, search through my list of artists, albums and select a track and start playing it, compare this to 19.1 for the ipod doing pretty much the same thing and you can see that it'll take some time to get used to the zen's controls. you can alter the sensitivity of the pad but it still isn't that great.
In addition there are four face buttons on the player, all backlite'd in a cool blue colour, here we have controls to play/pause, go backwards in menus, a button to add ratings (similar to the ipod) and list all songs in the current playlist - this button will also act as a shortcut to your favorite action when in the main menus - and finally a contextual button that will pull up a menu to skip through the track, get details (play counts, bitrate etc), remove (full albums or individual tracks) playback modes (shuffle, repeat etc) save as playlist and pull up all of the artists tracks. These buttons are a little too stiff imo and they make one handed operation a little more difficult that it perhaps could have being.
[size=x-large]Features[/size]
One of the big selling points of the zen is that it can play videos, I've had freinds with video ipods who are a little annoyed with the long winded encodeing options so kudos to the boys at creative for putting divx and wmv playback as standard, playback is smooth and the screen gives a good view of the action, I wouldn't really want to watch a full film on there but if you are someone who might - for example - watch last nights 24 on the train to work then it should do the job. It also has support for video podcasts but i have yet to try that out since you need to install creative own software for that which I have yet to do since I have just used windows media player 11 for the moment.
Another big advantage of this unit is the support for the microsoft "PlaysForSure" services such as napster and (in the US) yahoo! Using the napster software has automatically dropped all the tracks I downloaded from there onto the player without too much of a fuss, so you can use a combination of media player and napster without any problems.
In addition to this the zen will automatically pull your pictures from your "my pictures" folder, kinda annoying if you have alot of rubbish in there but you can delete what you don't want without too much hastle. Pictures look crisp and bright and full of detail, although if you want to setup a slide show you have to use a PC and the software supplied.
Oh and it has an FM tuner which can pick up local and national radio stations, its not great but its there should none of your 30 gigs of tunes take your fancy. There is also a mic too, possibly useful for students taking lecture notes
So there you go, a good little player, reasonable size, reasonable price, a load of features, a great screen which is let down by some slightly iffy controls, sound quality is great but not much better than most other player.
Overall I'll give this player
[size=x-large]
8.8/10[/size]
Great player, iffy controls just knock it down a little
