Review of Zen Vision:M with 30GB HDD

Pros:

Gorgeous screen; great battery life; highly customizable menu; awesome video format compatibility (no need for tedious conversions).Besides the Creative Zen Vision:M has an incredible screen, a simple interface, an FM tuner and recorder, and a voice recorder. It features a customizable Shortcut button, and it supports a wide range of online music stores and subscription services, as well as video formats. It has excellent audio and video quality.

Cons:

Video hiccups every 10-15 minutes due to buffering; somewhat awkward control designs; MTP (meaning no Mac support ever); no games; non-removable battery. The Creative Zen Vision:M has no iTunes-like video content--yet--or support for Audible content--yet. Some will find the touch-pad controller frustrating. The black model scratches easily. The documentation is skimpy. You must use an adapter for transfers and power, meaning that occasionally you need two cables and the adapter. A dock and an A/V-out cable are not included. Finally, the Creative Zen Vision:M isn't as elegant as an iPod.

Review:

Despite some minor glitches, the Creative Zen Vision:M is evidently the most entertaining portable video player with plentiful of features, long battery life, stellar video performance, and high level of personalization.

Creative is playing some catch-up with Apple. Its rival iPod, shipped two months earlier, have been highly praised for its seamless integration with iTunes video, ranging from Podcast to $1.99 TV downloads. When everyone is trying to decide which portable video player to get for this Christmas, Creative timely airdrops the Zen Vision:M portable video player whose specs look familiar to the iPod. Despite their technical similarities , my in-depth investigation revealed a lot more.

Gorgeous Screen Showoff

Probably the first question people ask when reading this review is whether the Creative Zen Vision:M has a better screen than the video iPod. Putting the video iPod next the Zen, the Creative seems to take the lead with the colors on the 2.5" QVGA screen being very vivid and vibrant. The LCD's contrast is excellent. There's just a bit too much color saturation than necessary, causing some finer details to wash away.

In comparison to the video iPod, the Zen's screen is also a lot brighter, and the brightness control (increments by 10%) sure comes in handy. Oddly, the LCD lost half of its clarity when viewing straight at 45-degree angles. When the portable video player is inactive, the backlight will only dim to a level just enough for you to find your way even in complete darkness. If you key locked the video player, the screen will just turn off.

Navigation Control Lessons

From clockwise top right, Play/Pause; Contextual Menu; Back; ShortcutI've a neutral feeling towards the navigation controls. The four main buttons sitting underneath the screen are all within your fingertips, and their labels illuminate in aqua blue when you press anyone of them. Though, you have to look carefully to notice the arrow labels on the two sides of the touch stconvert are buttons.

And to quickly jump to your favorite tunes, Creative provides a new mechanism that searches files in their alphabetical order. Another way is to press on either the top or bottom end of the touchpad to accelerate the scroll speed. I feel that the touchpad takes practice to get used to as I often overshot the target menu and tapped on items by mistakes while scrolling. Overall, the controls are much improved but not as streamlined as the iPod's click wheel.

Bulk & Battery

Besides the buttons, there's only a slider on top of the Zen Vision:M that controls the power and locks the player. The microphone is on the left. Creative has offloaded the mini-USB 2.0 port, DC-in and video out to a dock connector; without it, you can't charge or sync. You neither find a remote nor a dock stand. The only accessory of the Zen Vision:M is a pouch to prevent screen scratches. Creative has thoughtfully bundled an AC adapter, which can reduce the recharging time from 6hrs via USB to 2.5hrs. The cable may also explain the $30 price difference with the $299 video iPod 30GB.

The Zen Vision:M felt quite sturdy even when subject to a certain amount of pressure. It is anything but slim, and holding it on hand reminded me of the rather thick fourth generation iPod 40GB. The Zen's bigger battery could be the reason. (I couldn't verify due to the battery now being an integrated component.)

Still, anything less wouldn't give us the 4 hours of XivD video playback, enough for even the extended LOTR: Return of the King. I conducted the tests with the highest brightness setting and 70% volume. An average movie lasts about an hour and 40 minutes. So, that leaves plenty of juice for stuff like photos and music. For audiophiles, the Zen Vision:M lasted just under 12hrs by repeatedly playing assorted WMAs (160kbps) and MP3s (192kbps) at 55% volume with moderate LCD usage.

Zen Video & Music

One of the Zen Vision:M advantages over the video iPod and iRiver U10 is its DivX/XviD friendliness. The video player's codec supports DivX4/5, XviD5, MPEG-1/2/4SP, and WMV9 as well as Motion-JPEG. I doubt many of you will miss H.264/AVC before it gains popularity. For DivX fans, your films will flawlessly play on the Zen Vision:M, given they are below 720x576. The good old MPEG-1 files are required to be encoded at 2500kbps or lower bitrate.

The media inspection seems to be more restrictive on the WMV. One instance, my Zen prompted it could only handle WMV3 video codec, and then it rejected my HD GameSpot video reviews, which far exceeded the player's 800kbps total bitrate, 30fps and 320x240 limitations. Unlike iTunes 6, Creative's Media Explorer offered us 3 encoding options to convert files into compatible WMVs.

As far as video & compatibility quality go, the Zen Vision:M gave me the most satisfying experience. Its video decoder handled all my high-res MPEG, XviD and DivX with ease. I saw no artifacts even when there was a lot of pixel shifting going on. Perhaps the only minor annoyance was the buffer flushing that caused a very slight delay in video playback every 10 minutes or so. This didn't affect the video / audio sync afterwards. With an optional AV cable, the Zen Vision:M can double a multimedia viewer, such as the Iomega ScreenPlay. Incidentally, you can password protect any video content folders with a 4-digit code from prying eyes.

With the equalizer turned off, the bass is tight, but the 'bass boost' somewhat distorted the low-range at high volume. There are 8 preset equalizer settings, and you can customize your own. During playback, the Zen Vision:M makes use of most ID3 tags. Album art is shown next to the track info, but you can't enlarge the image like in the video iPod. You can also rate the song, but my '4 stars or more' smart playlist didn't update accordingly until the next sync with WMP10.

Pressing the menu brings up the bookmark, file details, play mode, file removal and artist lookup. On-the-go playlist and lyrics are absent in the Zen Vision:M. I suggest Creative considers these additions in future firmware. In a nutshell, Creative's hierarchical menu structure is reminiscent of the video iPod (or should I say vice versa). I particularly liked the 2x3 album art matrix; the sidebar allows you to jump through CDs alphabetically. If that isn't enough, you can try the keyword search using the rather primitive on-screen, scroll-to-select QWERTY keyboard.

(Update (21/12/2005): Creative's support site for Zen Vision:M is coming into shape, and I was able to obtain step-by-step instructions on how to create an on-the-go playlist. The Zen's approach to playlist, personally speaking, is somewhat unconventional, so I didn't figure out in the first place. The Zen requires that you clear your 'Now Playing' list first (if you've been playing music already) and then add the songs individually or albums via 'Add to Selected' in the contextual menu. The shortcut button is a godsend for this type of tedious task. Simply set 'Add to Selected' as your shortcut button, and the procedures will become much more simpler. If not, getting in and out of the contextual menu to add a song/album is a chore. Lastly, you have to go back inside the 'Now Playing' to give the new playlist a name using the same on-screen keyboard. I would say the implementation is not exactly the most desired solution, but on-the-go playlist do work.)

Extras: FM, PIM, Photos

Besides a powerful music management system, Creative steps up the extras with a nice photo viewer that is set up of your choice in a 5x4 matrix or on a list. The pictures, however, are scaled, but not digitally resampled to fit on the 320x240. I saw a lot of jagged lines as a result, and that's probably why there's an one-level zoom and rotate function. Additionally, the Zen Vision:M can pull EXIF info out of each JPEG, and put them in the ‘details' area. All these features make me wonder if Creative has a USB OTG camera connector in product agenda.

The Zen Vision:M lets you pick an image for a system-wide wallpaper, which can be manipulated with filters (warm, cool, gray, sepia) and adjusted for brightness to improve menu text legibility. Not only that, you can personalize the interface with 6 different colorful themes. You can import up to 16 megapixels for JPEG baseline and up to 8 megapixels for progressive JPEG into the photo album. The sync option allows for image re-sampling to Zen's native resolution without tampering your originals.

Calendar, contacts and tasks are extracted from the Outlook database. Outlook Express is limited to contact sync only. Though, I would like to see the sync process doesn't need the use of Sync Manager.

The Zen Vision:M can record from FM radio in IMA ADPCM 22khz stereo and voice via built-in microphone in IMA ADPCM 16khz mono. Don's expect crystal-clear quality though. I noticed the FM radio picked up a lot of static noises in the urban area; this maybe only a localized problem since the signal strength never reached second level for me. The voice recording will do a fine job if not in a lecture hall. Both FM and voice are capped at 10hr recording limit.

Sync'ing Options, XP Only

There are various ways to transfer video, pictures and songs to your Zen Vision:M. The new Media Explorer is handy for importing video, as it will offer video conversions as needed. It maybe suitable for those who still like old school method of the drag and drop files. To take advantages of the smart playlists, picture ratings, album art and PlayforSure media download, you should opt for Windows Media Player 10. Either method is subject to MTP protocol restrictions, so Windows XP is a system requirement. My only complaint is the Podcast integration, or lack thereof.

Recap

The Creative Zen Vision:M is the first formidable opponent that the video iPod faces. It is very feature-rich, yet some functions are not very well executed. The button layout is logical, but not very intuitive. The most praised area is its stellar DivX/XviD performance as well as the beautiful screen. The video battery life (twice that of 30GB video iPod) is also a fair tradeoff for the large casing. In the end, Microsoft support for PlayforSure stores will ensure a variety of content to fill up your Zen Vision:M.

Conclusions:

Although we had fond feelings for Creative's Zen Vision, the portable video player (PVP) with the dazzling VGA screen, Apple's video-capable iPod quickly stole our hearts away. Now Creative has wooed us again with the Zen Vision:M, a decidedly video iPod-like device with a better screen, more features, and even more choices of colors. Music fans will find it particularly appealing, as it plays nice with most online stores and subscription services. Admittedly, Apple still has the edge in video content; Creative has yet to land any content providers for TV shows or movies, though video podcasts now stand ready, courtesy of Creative's new ZenCast service. But we're willing to bet it won't be long before you can download Battlestar Galactica or Kung Fu Hustle for on-the-go viewing. Also, video subscription is coming, with Starz Vongo leading the way. And you'll be able to watch longer thanks to the Vision:M's four-hour battery life--a major improvement over the iPod's two hours. Watch out, Apple: Creative's latest is no mere pretender to the PVP throne.