creative zen vision m 30gb review

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Picture courtesy of Rasmus.

Average Ratings

Sound Quality	9.2/10
Battery Life	8.5/10
Features	9.3/10
Value for Money	7.9/10
Reviewer Rating	9.2/10
Overall Rating	8.7/10

95% Recommended21 out of 22 Reviews

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  • Rajstuff109's review
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By Rajstuff109 on 6th Apr 2007

Rajstuff109's Ratings

Time MP3 Player Owned	1 - 6 Months
Sound Quality	10/10
Battery Life	10/10
Features	10/10
Memory	30 GB
Value for money	10/10
Overall value	10/10
Rajstuff109's recommendation

Good Points

Great sound quality compared to the 30Gb iPod Video.
Can set it to play all songs at the same volume.
Amazing video compared to the 30Gb iPod Video.
£10 to £20 cheaper than the 30Gb iPod Video.

Bad Points

I wish I had bought this instead of my 30Gb iPod Video, which broke after 15 months.

General Comments

I originally bought a 30Gb iPod Video, which I took good care of, and unfortunately it broke after 15 months.

I phoned Apple support, and they said their is a standard fee for fixing faulty iPod, which is £165
So basically they won't fix them. They just replace and charge you more than you can buy one new for.

So I really hate Apple now, and I will never buy one of their products.

Anyway, I bought myself a replacement. And after doing some research, I bought a Creative ZEN Vision M 30Gb MP3 player.

Because I have had both products, I can give a balanced comparison of this product.

The poor service from Apple has not coloured my review of this far superior and cheaper video MP3 player.

The sound quality is far superior.
To ensure the test was not based on the included headphones being cheap, which can easily be replaced by something better, I used my £150 over the head Sennheiser headphones to test.
The Apple iPod sound quality is so bad, I didn't even notice a difference with the headphones.
The Creative Zen, which already had much clearer sound with the included headphones, became a lot better.

Next the video quality.
The Creative Zen is well known for having far superior video quality, and it does.

It looks as though Apple spent 90% of their design time on making it look pretty, and the sound and video quality was an after thought.

Apple are a company that used to make computers.
Creative Labs is a company that makes top notch sound cards for PC's, including their amazing EMU range, specifically designed for hard drive audio recording.

In terms of the features, the Creative Zen has all the same useless features that iPod's have. Who on earth buys a MP3 player so they can synchronise their email features?

The most important of the features that the Creative has, which are not on the iPod are:

5 band EQ, which doesn't reduce the sound quality like digital effects normally do.
In the random play section, as well as the random play all, their is random play most listen to and random play least listen to.

It is also far easier to hook it up to a TV, or to other devices without being fleeced.
The Apple iPod only plays it's own video format. Whereas the Creative Zen will play pretty much any format. And any formats it doesn't play will be converted by the software included with the Zen Vision.

The iPod video format is a very low resolution. So while you can connect it to a TV, you really wouldn't want to.

The Zen Vision can store it in it's original full resolution format.
Each time you copy a video to the Zen Vision it gives you the option of reducing the resolution to the same resolution that its screen is.
So if you want to conserve hard drive space, then this is really handy.

So to sum up:

Apple should be ashamed that there is a competitor to their own 30Gb iPod Video that has far better sound, and hugely better video quality, and it also has more useful functionality and easier to use software.
But not only that, it is cheaper.

The cheapest I found was from Amazon.

Don't buy an iPod.

Buy one of these lovely machines, that looks and feels great, and it has quality oozing out of it.

Total Respect: +3