Creative Zen 4 GB Portable Media Player (Black)
by Creative
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List Price: Our Price: $45.00 You Save: $54.99 (55%) Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Category: Network Media Player See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Creative Zen 4 GB Portable Media Player (Black)
Customer Review: FOR AUDIOBOOK LISTENERS!
Summary: 4 Stars
if you listen primarily to music with lots of playlists (or watch a lot of videos) then this review will have little relevance for you. i spend a lot of time listening to audiobooks, often in WMA format which rules out the only really good mp3 player, the ipods. i've gone through (tried and given away or returned) several mp3 players. bottom line in my opinion: for audiobooks (where the book is 1 or 2 or 3 very big files), all mp3 players pretty much suck.
why? first, often then don't hold their place well. secondly, the fast forward or rewind -- when you need to get BACK to your place, which often requires lots of interpolation -- is often clumsy and, worse, slow (i've had to literally hold down a "FF" control for 5-8 min to get near the end of a novel where i'd left off). third, the most egregious misdesign for audibookphiles is that (unlike the great ipods) the same control used to FF or RW also takes you back to the beginning or the end of a file. in many mp3 players it's woefully easy to be trying to FF and RW to get back to where you were (because the player lost your place or froze up or whatever) when, oops! suddenly you're back at the beginning -- 8 hours or whatever from where you wanted to be. blood pressure rising....
enter the zen. it's certainly one of the least evil of mp3 players for audiobookphiles (which i will heretofore simply acronimify as ABPs).and why is that? one word (no, not plastics): bookmarks.
very few mp3 players allow bookmarking (yeah, that's one area where even the well-designed ipods fall short). quite simply, when you set a bookmark, the mp3 player remembers that place in that file (book) and allows you to go right back to it. it's a failsafe. and it works.
a few mp3 players (including a couple other creative products) do bookmark. the zen 4gb (and higher gbs) is one of the newest. it permits up to 10 bookmarks.
i've had my zen for a couple weeks or a bit more and feel fairly good about assessing it this way: overall,it's so-so. again give me an ipod any day (except apple won't allow it to play wma files). i've had plenty of issues including freezing up (keep a paper clip handy for the tiny reboot hole!), battery life shorter than promised and -- very often -- this player also failing to keep its place (that's unlike the creative muvo tx i've used which had no bookmark but at least it always kept your last spot). i wouldn't necessarily recommend it for general use.
however, its reliable and easy bookmarking is great and for that reason i do recommend it for ABPs. (it does have other commendable features which are summed up in product summary and other reviews; it's certainly not bad.) also, it's better than most at permitting you, with some care, to FF or RW WITHOUT accidentally telling it to go to the beginning or end.
if you DO buy this to listen to long audiobooks, USE THE BOOKMARK FEATURE constantly. before i set the player down (on pause) or turn it off, i always, always bookmark my spot. doing so has saved my arse many times, now. you can set the handy shortcut key to "bookmark" so when you turn it on later, to find to your horror that your last spot at -- what was it? 4 and some hours into the novel? or was it 5? etc.-- is not what comes up but rather you're back at the beginning, you need only hit the shortcut then enter and bingo, there you are: 4 hours and 28 minutes, right where you'd left off.
bottom line: obviously i'm saying if you listen to long audiobooks (such as wma files or audible downloads),the zen 4gb is a good bet. i'm also saying it could be a lot better and maybe someday creative or someone else will make one that's a home run instead of just a base hit.
Customer Review: Very satisfied.
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this player off of a third party retailer on amazon. I recieved it 3 days after ordering, and paid about $90 for it, which was very reasonable in my opinion. This player is everything it is cracked up to be and more.
Pros :
Very clear, bright screen. I have mine on 20% brightness and it is just fine
Easy installation of software
Flawless conversion of non-supported video formats.
Expandable with an SD card, which are cheap as dirt nowadays.
Music quality is excellent.
Video playback is stunning, for such a small screen.
Can use content from iTunes (it even has a button on its management software that says "Get music from itunes")
Back will not scratch easily as it is hard plastic.
YOU CAN DELETE STUFF FROM THE PLAYER WITHOUT CONNECTING IT TO THE SOFTWARE!!!!!! I love this feature, because the software used to put music on the player organizes the music by author name, so I got a few extra and unwanted songs from my computer by accident. I was elated to find out that I could just delete them from the player, rather than having to hook it up, find the song, and delete it.
Radio is crystal clear and automatically scans for stations that are coming in well, then sets them as your presets, with the push of one button.
Price. Try to find another player that has 4 GB plus expandability, video capacity, a great screen, and a good interface for under 100 dollars brand new.
Menu configurability. You have the ability to configure the main menu, to a degree. Things that are normally submenus can be placed directly on the main menu, and you can choose to hide things on the main menu that you do not wish to use a lot, such as the recorder.
Neutral (These things neither add nor detract from the overall user experience)
Menu system could be better, and is somewhat comparable to the ipod system, where there is a main menu set and then sub menus, sub-sub menus, etc. It is easy to get back to the main menu with a few pushes of the back button. Configurability is a nice touch. Also, it is easy to create playlists, and navigation is a breeze, as you can sort by album, artist, or just go to all songs, press the right arrow once to go to the alphabetical movement mode (pressing down goes from beginning of A to beginning of B, etc.)So this is almost a pro, but not quite.
Recorder doesn't have the greatest quality, but you can easily tell what you were saying i when you play it back, and i didn't buy this for the recorder anyway. It is basically just an added bonus for me.
Cons:
Earphone jack placement is terrible, for me at least. It is in the upper right hand corner, where I like to put my hand to hold it, and it is right in the way of the way I would prefer to hold it.
Media software is a bit annoying in that media from other sources is displayed under the artists name in a folder, which can lead to confusion when you open the folder and see the album name, and the name is the same album that is under seven different artists as well. This is only awkward if you have albums with a medly of artists, however.
Conclusion:
The amount of bang for your buck you get out of this player is incomparable to any other I have seen. I would say that if you have your heart set on an ipod, you are going to be looking for flaws in this player, and small things are going to bother you. However, as someone who has used ipods and found itunes to be irritating at times, and found ipods to be highly overrated, this is the player for you. If you have your heart set onn an ipod, drop the extra 50 bucks on a nono, third gen. But you'll be missing out on a lot.
Customer Review: Creative Zen for Podcasts
Summary: 5 Stars
I mainly use my Zen for Podcasts. Overall, it does an excellent job and I thoroughly enjoy it for this purpose. I previously had a Samsung touch screen MP3 player. The controls on this device were extremely frustrating because of the lack of tactile feedback and the poor design of the navigation scheme. The navigation scheme on the Zen, in contrast, is very intuitive. However, I do have some concerns with the Zen for Podcasting:
(1) I am having trouble getting the book marking feature to work. I would like to be able to pause a Podcast, listen to music (or perhaps a "lighter" Podcast) for a while, and then jump back to where I left off in the Podcast. I can't figure out how to do this.
(2) When I pause the Zen for even a relatively brief time it will shut down, thus requiring a re-boot. This is inconvenient as I find that it is often necessary to pause listening to a Podcast, and I enjoy many Podcasts so much that I don't want to miss even a single word. (When the Zen shuts off by itself during a pause, it is not easy to get it to re-start in the Podcast where it left off at the time of shutdown, so you don't want to make the mistake of having this happen.)
(3) The text description of the Podcast is shown more completely than was the situation with my Samsung MP3 player, which is a huge advantage. If the text description is long, the Zen will scroll the text across the screen (right to left). However, the scroll speed is too slow. If I need to jump through the descriptions of the various Podcasts on my player to find one of interest, it is irritating to have to wait for the scrolling to finish showing the entire description. In fact, the screen dims after a short period of time to save battery life. (The time to dim can be set in the configuration system.) Often, the screen will dim before the scrolling is finished. I can't read the text on the dimmed screen, adding to the frustration level. This problem could be solved if there was a way to set the Zen to display all of the MP3 metadata on a single screen during the process of clicking through all of the Podcasts. This would allow the user to quickly identify the details of a particular Podcast. I'm sure that Creative could update the firmware to serve this function. In fact, I would love for MP3 manufacturers to provide an option for a full metadata display. At the moment, there isn't a universal scheme for populating the metadata fields for Podcasts. Therefore, what any individual MP3 player displays from the metadata is variable (and sometimes inadequate.
(4) As noted by many reviewers, boot time on this device is a bit too slow. Also, shut-down is not instantaneous. Since I need to shut down the unit every time I want to pause (e.g., if my wife wants to ask a question), I find the delay for boot-up and shut-down to be irritating. You should realize that the player will start-up in your Podcast exactly where the shut-down occurred, which obviously is a necessity if you are going to use shut-down to pause. As noted, if you let the Zen shut itself down during a pause, you may have difficulty getting back to the exact spot where you paused when the you re-boot.
So, in sum, this is a superb MP3 player for Podcasts. However, it isn't perfect. Bookmarking may work, but I haven't figured out how to use this feature yet. And, having to shut-down and re-boot constantly is an irritation.
Finally, battery life is pretty darn good: I routinly take my Zen on transcontinental air flights and I find the battery lasts all of the way in one direction. But don't forget to re-charge at your destination! You may not make it back on the same charge.
Customer Review: Met my expectations-- which were not high.
Summary: 3 Stars
I have now been using this product for several months and my opinion of it has risen-- especially since I had a chance to play with an ipod touch recently. I had more trouble playing videos with the ipod than I did with the Zen. I can recommend the Zen. Give it 4 stars.
Original review:
I bought this player to watch videos as well as to listen to mp3 podcasts. It meets my expectations-- which did not extend to perfection.
Pros:
* As an audio mp3 player, it is fine. It supports bookmarking mp3 files.
* The screen is good. The user interface is simple.
* It is less proprietary than an ipod nano. This matters to me.
* Works fine with Linux using gnomad2.
* The supplied Windows software mostly works (with Vista 32).
* Cheaper than ipod nano (3rd gen).
* Bigger screen than ipod nano (3rd gen). This matters. The zen screen is just barely big enough to watch a movie on. Frankly, letter box movies display too small. I cannot imagine watching one on the smaller ipod screen.
Cons:
* It is nowhere near as elegant as an ipod nano.
* The USB 2.0 connection uses the MTP protocol (see wikipedia). Thus, it does not look like a USB disk drive the way I like.
* Does not support video book marks. I wish they would add this feature.
* It accepts an external SD card which is good, but its capabilities differ when playing media from the SD card. This is very bad. It does not support audio bookmarks on mp3 files on the SD card. It does not even remember its position in an audio file when you turn off the unit. Same for video. I found a 4 GB SDHC class 4 card worked. Avoid fat32. In summary, the SD card option is far from fully useful.
* You cannot replace the battery.
* It does not play just any video file. It has to be encoded just right.
* It does not play many video files encoded for ipods without doing a transcode. This is problem because many video podcasts cater to ipod.
* The supplied windows software transcodes to windows media and mostly works-- with only some minor audio problems. It does not handle transcoding from HD MPEG2 files.
* I have been transcoding with mencoder and ffmpeg. I found I have to use an integer valued frame rate to avoid major audio sync problems.
* I see some playback pixelization (that I do not see on a computer) especially at bit rates below 700 kbps.
I have been using the following mencoder options with general success.
mencoder INFILE -o OUTFILE.avi -ofps 30 -vf scale=320:240 -oac mp3lame -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=700
You have to use complicated crop options to deal properly with vertical black sidebars.
All in all, you better know what you are doing if you expect to be able to transcode just any video for playback on the Zen. As I further hint to help you, here is a 2-pass ffmpeg script that works well for me.
#!/bin/tcsh
# usage: cmd infile outfile
/cygdrive/c/apps/ffmpeg/ffmpeg.exe -i $1 -y -s 320x240 -g 300 -pass 1 -passlogfile $2:r.tmp -r 30 -vtag XVID -b 600k -f avi -acodec libmp3lame -async 1 $2
echo pass 2
/cygdrive/c/apps/ffmpeg/ffmpeg.exe -i $1 -y -s 320x240 -g 300 -pass 2 -passlogfile $2:r.tmp -r 30 -vtag XVID -b 600k -f avi -acodec libmp3lame -async 1 $2
\rm -f $2:r.tmp
Customer Review: Great Value
Summary: 5 Stars
The Creative Zen was my choice for an iPod replacement. I have had terrible luck with iPods, so i figured after the third on it was time for a new brand. I bought an set of Creative brand speakers years ago and loved the sound, and had a computer with a Creative sound card, and that was the beast part of the machine.
I looked at the Zen cautiously at first, it is a fairly new product, in its first generation. After reading other reviews, i decided to pick it up based mostly on previous experience with Creative products as well as the set of features that this player has.
This particular model is a 4GB, which means it has ample storage for your favorite tunes. And at only $90, it is a great price as well. It includes a voice recorder (something unheard of on iPod products), the ability to change your background screen (a little thing, but nice anyway),a radio tuner, and lastly the SD Card slot on the top of the product. This allows you to have virtually endless storage so long as you are OK with buying SD Cards. The voice recorder is nice, and so is the radio, they both perform exactly as expected.
The player itself has a simple enough face; a square button in the center for menu selection, housed by a larger square which is used for the up/down selection in menus and the previous/next track in the now playing screen. There is a rocker above this for going back through the menus on the left, and a context sensitive menu button on the right, allowing you to do a large number of screens depending on the screen you are on; anything from adding to a playlist or selecting the play mode. The rocker on the bottom of the face is a button that you can set the functionality of yourself (out of the box it is set for Album of the Day) and the other side is the play pause button.
The interface of the product is easily navigated, and the number of options is great. A number of EQ setting are good for novice audiophiles, but the custom 5 channel EQ is great for getting exactly the sound you want.
I only have a few gripes overall, but most are cosmetic anyway. First, the screen is easily scratched like most devices like this, so you need to be extra careful. The buttons feel kind of cheap, but I have had no problems with them. The bundled software is easy to use, however the fact the this player does not support podcasts with out conversion is a little tough for me to swallow as a newly converted iPod user. For some reason, the player has a tendency to put all of songs on an album in alphabetical order, as oppose to the track order on the album, but that is probably just a small button push or click away from being fixed.
My biggest issue is that thwe SD Card is not integrated into the rest of the functionality of the device. You need to go to the option for Memory Card in the menu to look at the music there, and listen to it from this screen. This would be fine, but the player does not allow you to navigate menus or anything while listening music from the SD. You cannot add the music to playlists, nor will the player shuffle through the music in the flash memory and the SD. This could be fixed with a firmware upgrade, and lets hope it is.
All in all, a wonderful product, a good price, and a great brand. High recomended.