Creative Zen Sleek Review

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Creative Zen Sleek
★★★★☆
4.4
80.0% of users recommend this
  • Sound Quality

  • Battery Life

  • Features

  • Value For Money

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Psythik's review of Creative Zen Sleek

“For those of you who were wondering, the removable...”

★★★★★

written by Psythik on 10/12/2005

Good Points
Amazing sound quality (better than iPod)
Voice Recorder
FM Tuner/Recorder
Removable Disk mode configurable up to 16GB
Price

Bad Points
Dust can get caught under the screen (easy fix, though)
Vertical touch pad takes some time to get used to

General Comments
For those of you who were wondering, the removable disk option on the Creative Zen Sleek MP3 Player is uber easy to configure; all you do is go to Extras > Removable Disk and set the capacity anywhere from 512MB to 16GB.



The best part is that you don't even need a computer to enable it! Within literally seconds it was ready to go, and I was able to plug it into my PC and immediately start transferring files.



Windows XP/2k machines automatically recognise it as a Removable Disk drive (just like a thumb drive) and configure it for you (I've noticed that Win2k has everything ready to go a few seconds faster than XP. I haven't yet tested it on Windows 9x, though).



One thing you have to do though is select the Removable Disk option in the player every time you want to utilise it or else the PC will recognise it as just an MP3 player.



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A feature I love that's also lacking in the iPod is the Menu button on the bottom right that reminds me of right-clicking in Windows. When in the Main Menu, clicking it brings up some options to reorganize it's layout to suit your needs. Pressing it while in Now Playing brings up a menu that lets you View Details on a song, such as Genre, Bit rate, and Play Count. Very useful indeed. Other options include bookmarking the position in a song (useful for long tracks), saving the song to a playlist, deleting it from the player, and looking up all songs on the player from the same artist. Also whatever menu you're in, you can just press that menu button and adjust the volume. The menu button is a very nice, as well as essential feature that the iPod doesn't have.



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Another nice feature is DJ Mode. It has four modes, Album of the Day (plays a random album), Random Play All (plays every song once in random order), Most Popular (plays the top 20 most heard songs), and Rarely Heard (plays the top 20 least songs heard). Very, very nice.



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If anyone's worried about FM reception, don't worry, I live a good twenty minutes from the next major city (Phoenix), and reception's great. However, I owned a Zen Micro before I returned it to get the Sleek, and I found the Micro's reception to be very poor (might have had a bad unit). By the way, the antenna is the headphone cable, so don't try to record anything from the radio without headphones plugged in because all you'll get is static.



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The voice recording feature is nice, but remember, it's good for nothing more than just voice. I did manage to record an electric guitar solo inside a high school gym; however don't expect high quality because one, you can only record at 64kbps, and two, the recording clips and makes annoying blips if what you're recording is too loud.



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Claimed battery life is 16 hours. The number doesn't lie, but it's assuming you have Smart Volume, as well as Bass Boost and EQ settings disabled. With all these enabled, I got around 9-10 hours battery life. Lowering the contrast setting to 30% jacked-up battery life to about 11-14 hours while keeping the screen easily readable. Battery Life also depended on how many times I switched songs or played around with settings.



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Now I guess I should actually mention a bit about listening to MP3's on this, since that's probably the main reason you are interested in an MP3 player. Let me just tell you this, the quality is phenomenal, five to one against the iPod. With a much higher signal to noise ratio than the iPod's, I was able to crank this baby to max volume (which is very loud, let me tell you), and hear absolutely no distortion. In fact, the sound quality is so good, that I started ripping all my MP3's to 192k and above because I could easily hear the decrease of quality due to compression in 128k MP3's! In fact, I've gone as far as ripping some of my favourite songs as WAV because the Zen Sleek brings out every single detail of my music! Mind you, I was listening to all my music with the stock buds for a long time and could still hear the difference. Upgrade to high-end buds, such as the Etymotic ER-6i, and prepare to be blown away! Clipping does occur, though, when using over-tweaked EQ settings. Easily fixed by enabling the Smart Volume Mode.



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Be aware, though, that the Sleek isn't perfect. After just a couple of weeks of owning a Sleek, I noticed dust getting caught under the screen. However, a quick gust from a can of electronics-safe compressed air fixed the problem. A real minor issue.



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All in all, the under-appreciated Zen Sleek owns the iPod in all categories. Don't get sucked into buying the $300+ iPod just because everyone else has one; I got my Zen Sleek for $200 USD at Best Buy and I couldn't be more satisfied.



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Final Score: 8.75/10

  • Value For Money

  • Sound Quality

  • Features

  • Battery Life

  • 1 - 6 Months

    Time MP3 Player Owned

  • 20GB (formatted: 18.6GB, same as iPod)

    Memory

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Skyrail's Response to Psythik's Review

Written on: 19/03/2006

Wow this is pretty amazing review, ive been thinking about getting a new mp3 pllayer for sometime. I would like an IPod beacause of the wheel, however i don't have the money so im going to stick with a Creative Zen, either this one or the Sleek Photo :)

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