Zen Vision W - Reviewed

There is always a time when music is not enough. Yes, Bose may agree that music is expression of oneself but come on, seeing is believing.
Gone are the days when you had to rent out a dvd from the local video rental library, hook it up to your dvd player and find it not working. Overturn the dvd to find those nasty scratch, etched, the dog? the careless movie watcher?
If you live, eat and sleep, movies, the age of the portable media player has heeded the call.

These gadgets are all you have ever asked for. Small, light, fairly portable and of course your dream come true.
Off late the market has been flooded with affordable PMP's. You now have the option of carrying all your movies, music and pictures in a single handheld device.
Considering these gadgets have recently been popularized in the market, they are surely the future of portable multimedia.

I've listed below a few of the really popular PMP's.
The creative zen vision w
The Cowon A2
The Archos Gen 4 and Gen 5 PMP's
Also catching up is the Toshiba Gigabeat

But here we discuss the Zen vision W.


I have always been a big fan of Creative products and trust them entirely. Nut now when your buying an expensive piece of machinery like this one, it is but natural to review the product extensively and compare it to its competitors.

Lets start off with the player design and specs.
A list of specs are available at the creative website itself.
This player is definitely not the definition of portable and you surely will not be seen going for a jog with this.
But of course the pay off is the huge 4.3" TFT screen. It sports a 480x272 pixel display with 262K colors. Believe me the picture is mind blowing.
The body looks and feels solid and is very durable.
The control buttons on the side are no the best of the lot and make clicking sounds when pressed. They include a 5 way controller, a back key, a menu key, play pause, next and previous key. Below these keys is the stereo speaker, which is not extremely audible for musical playback but loud enough while watching a movie.
The volume, power and hold buttons are located on the top of the player and are easily accessible .
The base of the player provides the docking port and the standard mini usb port.
The left of the player has a compact flash slot, so all you shutterbugs can directly transfer your photographs to the player.


To the right of the player carefully tucked, are the 5V DC IN and the composite A/V OUT.
The battery is a lithium ion battery pack which is detachable. Very useful.
The earphones are quite poor. By poor i do not mean bad, i mean the design and the output does not compliment this player. I would suggest you pick up a good pair of earphones/headphones.



Now the features.
The most distinct part of the player is the video.
It support most common formats WMV, MPEG-4 SP, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, DivX 4.x and 5.x, and XviD.
The quality is top notch, colors are brilliant.It flawlessly played everything i threw at it. Well almost everything(more on this later).
The video starts immediately and skipping to another section is quite effortless. I fast forwarded from 2 mins to 63 mins, there was a pause of just about 2 seconds.
You can leave off a movie at any point of time and start playing from the same point.

The audio quality is excellent. This feature has absolutely no glitches except for the album art feature which will be discussed later.
It has has a manual equalizer and quite a few presets.
You can play a song and browse away to the main menu and use other features of the player.

The image quality is excellent and you can even manage to watch movies or browse through pictures with direct sunlight on the screen.
You have the feature of creating a slideshow using the creative media explorer.

Another area where creative scores over other players is the radio. It is flawless, easy to use and can store upto 32 presets.

Has an inbuilt microphone. Very handy when you need to catch up with your sleep during that occasional lecture. I have not had the chance to test the entire capability of the microphone but its good.

Apart from the usual creative provides us with a calendar using which you can store day to day tasks. You can also store all your contacts onto the player. Both of the above can be synchronized using the creative sync manager.

Apart from this you have the ability for fully customize the player. You have skins to choose from (yet to find out if you can download more from the interweb). You can customize the audio, photo settings, display settings. It has a host of languages to choose from and allows you to protect sensitive content on your player.

The battery life is quite good i feel. On a complete charge i can play almost 5 hours of video content on about 30-40% percent brightness, which is what i keep it at. 100% brightness is very bright and clear but also drains the battery quicker.
Other optional accessories, including a Compact Flash Adapter, screen protector, standing case, travel charger, wired remote and IR remote.

A few glitches that i found are here.

1. Playback of different video formats actually depends in the the audio compression component. Content where audio is compressed with AC3, will not work. this needs to be converted to LameMP3 format.
To do this you can download this nifty tool called ZVM Video converter. This tool can convert an entire video file or individual audio or video components. Its very fast and very very easy to use.
Alternately you could also use the video converter provided by creative to convert videos to the appropriate format.
Note: Using the creative's video converter, scales the video to fit the players screen. This looks bad if you hook the player to you TV and play the same video.

2. Album art. The default firmware on the player may not support album art. For this download the latest firmware from creative's website. This also fixes a few other bugs.
Heres how you add album art.
CONNECT PLAYER TO PC -> OPEN USING CREATIVES MEDIA EXPLORER -> GOTO BROWSE MEDIA -> OPEN MUSIC -> Here you find boxes with grey cds's on the top on every folder you open. All you have to do is get the album art onto your pc, drag the image file and drop it in the box. As easy as that.

Overall this is a fantastic player and definitely worth what you pay.
Posted a video for all of you who want to check out the display of the vision w, here.
For further clarifications visit the creative forum or leave a comment.