Creative Zen Media Player

The Creative Zen Media Player is getting a lot of iPod converts, and there are many good reasons why. First of all, the Creative Zen portable Media player 4, 8 or 16GB Media player can fit an entire collection of music without difficulty and even have room for some videos. What the Creative Zen has to offer is you can load up your favorite songs as well as your album art.

In video, Creative Zen also has you covered. This credit card-sized player has a stunning 2.5" TFT color screen and is perfect for music, videos and photos. Enjoy up to 4,000 MP3, WMA or AAC songs, watch up to 60 hours of videos and share hundreds of photos with your friends.

Even expand your portable music, video or photo collection by adding additional content through the convenient SD memory. It may lack Wi-Fi but it supports a great number of audio formats including Apple's AAC files which is unlike any other media player. It can't play FLAC or Ogg Vorbis audio codecs, though.

Because everyone is an individual, and will have their own personal preferences for what they wantr from an MP3 player, here are several clever versions of the Zen player, including the Creative Zen X-Fi, the Zen Nano, the Creative Zen Mozaic, Creative Zen V Plus, and the Creative Zen Vision.

Creative Zen’s simple interface makes navigating your media with great ease. The controls you need are positioned against the right side of the device. Its directional pad and four surrounding buttons let you skim down quickly through menus. The Creative Zen is not ideal for one-handed operation, however. You have to steady the unit with your left hand while your right thumb taps to the desired song to get a clear look at the gorgeous screen. Zen's screen is fabulous. Photos are vibrant and bright, with excellent color saturation and good detail. Videos are also impressive with clear and bright with no noticeable pixilation (though we did notice the occasional blurring around some sharp edges)--and the viewing angle from side to side is excellent. Even the interface looks stunning, right down to the transparent icons on the main menu. It's a nice screen to look at for sure.

The Creative Zen also brags plenty of volume to drive a full-size set of 'phones. The rated battery life of 25 hours for audio and 5 hours for video is solid, and CNET Labs pretty much matched these estimates at 24.7 hours and 5.6 hours, respectively. It may not be the longest-lasting battery on the market, but the Zen certainly offers a good value with its lovely screen, nice sound, and good combination of features

Creative Zen Portable Media Player Specs