Creative Zen Vision:M MP3 Player

My old Dell Digital Jukebox (from like 5 or 6 years ago) finally drove me insane enough that I shelled out a few bucks and got a new MP3 player. I wanted something that was around the same hard drive size as my Dell (20 gb) because I wanted to be able to play not only music, but video files. Mark wrote about his new Vision:M so this is one that I wanted to check out. I did research for a week or two on different players, reading reviews on New Egg, CNET, and at Circuit City. The general consensus of the Vision:M was that it was a great player. Not only did it play MP3’s but it also played video (in several formats), had an FM tuner, and displayed pictures. It just so happened Circuit City had the player on sale, so I left work and picked it up last week. the audio quality from the player is excellent, but tell me, why doesn’t any electronics maker have an equalizer setting for hip-hop or rap? I’ve never come across one that has (except maybe Sony). The 2.5 inch display is very bright and colorful. I loaded The Boondock Saints, The Fifth Element, and the first season of Psych onto the player. The video quality on the player was excellent. Files that were compressed to 700mb looked awesome on the small screen, though I know if I played them on a tv, I would see a huge loss of quality. Luckily, on a screen that’s 2.5 inches, you don’t notice it at all.

The controls took some getting used to, as it has a touch pad that goes vertical instead of the more familiar wheel of the iPod. It didn’t take me long though, as my digital DJ also had a vertical wheel, though it wasn’t touch and I’m still getting used to the sensitivity of the touch pad. One thing I don’t like about the design is the volume is controlled via the players operating system and not a button on the player itself. Not that big of a deal, but I don’t like unlocking my player to turn up and down the volume when I need to. In case you are wondering, if the player is locked, the screen goes off which allows for longer playtime. With the player unlocked, the screen stays lit, although dimmer than if the player was active.

The software that came with the player is very intuitive and easy to use. I did notice that on my Vista Ultimate pc it seemed to max out my dual core processor. On the XP professional dual core pc at work, I didn’t notice it doing this. What’s great about this player is that it is very easy to NOT use the software. Dragging files into the audio or video folders on the drive using Windows Explorer is as easy as moving files to another hard drive. So, I don’t even need to use the software that comes with it (unless I want to make a playlist).

Overall, it is an excellent player, supports more video formats than the iPod, doesn’t have to use iTunes, and is much cheaper than an the iPod. It is well worth the money and I’m very happy thus far with my purchase.