I love this Creative Zen Vision M 30GB. I am visualy impaired and I am still able to use display and navigate using the touch pad and symple buttons. Sounds great and I love the fact that I have thousands of my favourate songs avalable at any tiem. However, I have had some problems with the software and my device has now crashed and I am not able to reload it. I am looking to get it fixed or replaced.

Easy to navigate through the menu, Brilliant screen for watching movies, Very reliable, leaves my sons ipod standing.. This is a brilliant piece of kit, I would rate it much higher than an ipod in every respect. Well recommend Creative Zen Vision M 30GB.

Make sure you read this before you buy any Creative player' .
I have always been a fan of Creative and a bit anti-i Pod. I have 6 daughters and all have been bought a Creative player over several years. The older players seemed to last for ages but the most recent (last 3 years) have all failed after just over a year. They ' re particularly weak on the headphone/earplug socket which is bound to get some wear. We've tried all sorts of models, hard disk versions and solid state. The kids love them when they're working but we're all walking away to find something better. None have lasted more than 18 months which is rubbish.
The most recent was a Zen Vision M, which lasted 13 months. It did start to misbehave before that but we weren't sure what it was. Turns out it's a definite hardware fault which can't be repaired economically. In this case, the problem ' s not related to the earphone socket. My daughter is very careful and it has been beautifully looked after and is spotless. I tried appealing to Creative because it seems unfair that something which costs £00's lasts just over a year. They were only interested in selling me a new one. Incredibly, even then they won't offer any kind of extended warranty on their products. That doesn't say much for their confidence in the technology. They clearly feel it's OK for us to buy a new player after a year or so, no matter how much it cost.
So, whilst I still am a fan of the creative players and would still buy one, learn from my experience over a number of models. Make sure you don't buy one unless you can get an extended warranty with the player. You need one which will give you a new (& up to date) one if the player breaks, at no cost. Don't risk anything less unless you can afford to be disappointed or, are going to throw it away and buy a new one next year.
Hope this has helped you or saved you some heartache.

I'd never trust Apple again, but the Creative is fantastic. Quite simply it's the thinking-man's (or woman's!) MP3 / video player.

The Creative ZEN Vision M 30GB is a must have object for the music lovers.
You can easily upload your music into the vision m (I hate the itunes way of uploading...creative system il more and more easily to use).
It reads mp3, avi, jpg and many other kind of files and it can record audio files. Finally it can play radio very well, without the need of any accessory.

The Creative ZEN Vision M is awesome! Wide screen easy to watch music videos and dvds. Sound is awesome and the mic to help record yourself singing dramatically is a great help. Way better than the ipod!

I love my Zen Vision M and use it every day. Reliable, good battery life and great video viewing screen. The only down side is the computer software, not hugely intuitive. It's definitely 'fool proof' but doesn't allow much flexibility in moving or renaming files. Overall though, definitely one of my favorite gadgets.

I have had my Creative for just over a year and I would be lost without it! I chose Creative over an Ipod as it is easy to 'plug and play' enabling me to get copies of some friends' music using Windows Media Player and not have to have I tunes as Ipod users do.
Unlike some users, I found the touch pad easy to use with an easy interface.

The Creative ZEN Vision M is good value for all its storage.. store data, pictures, videos and music, best part of it is that you can customise it.. take it wherever you go, plug and play from PC to charge up or wherever you just want to store a lot of information on it then the Zen creative player is just the one,.. no need to carry a 512 USB stick, or even a CD-RE/RW or floppy disk , when you can have it all under one thumb.. Perfect sound quality and imagery videos at your finger tips.

I have had my Creative Zen Vision M for about 3 months now and I think it's the first real mp3/mp4 player to keep up and outperform Apple's iPod. Having owned both the video iPod and the Zen, I found that the Zen was the stronger of the two, the iPod got scratched every time I used it, even in the case but the Zen is still scratch free, the screen and controls are easy and simple to use and the built in microphone is perfect for recording all my college lectures.
I think that this is the best mp3/mp4 player I've ever owned, the only down side is the cost but I still think it was worth it, a much better alternative to the video iPod

My Dad bought me a Creative ZEN Vision M 30gb as a birthday present. It took a little getting used to, especially the touch sensitive pad. I found it bulky and it's not the sort of MP3 player to stick in your pocket if you're going for a run. However, the memory is great, and for long train journeys, this has stopped me becoming bored. It's also great for transferring documents, music and videos.

I like the fact that it syncs to Windows Media Player because it meant that my already organised music collection got put onto my Creative and it was already sorted.

I did experience some problems. My first Creative crashed a few times, but I was able to reset it using the back end of my earring and no data was lost. However, after about a month, it stopped syncing to my laptop, then stopped syncing to any computer. I gave everything back to my Dad, who sent it back to the company. They very promptly sent me a brand new Creative which has not caused any problems to date.

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.

A superb piece of kit that outpods the iPod. If you want an Mp3 player for sound quality then this is the one! I have had an iPod mini which "froze" thanks to Apple constantly updating iTunes software. Yesterday I went out and bought an Apple Nano, which would not interface with my computer after one download of existing iTunes library. Changed it at the store and paid a bit more for a Creative Zen. I have to say the sound quality is significantly better than the Nano and the operating software is much more straight forward. Build quality is good and it has a nice substantial feel to it. I feel that this was money well spent.

In general, the Creative Zen Vision is a great product, in many aspects wins over iPod's video. Although it ask for a rather expensive price, but at this cost it is defintely worth it. Technically, I would recomend readers to get this PMP.

I really wish that Creative would advertise more because if they did then they would totally be owning the market over iPod. I'm not anti-iPod, but I just wish that people would stop buying into the false idea that iPod is the best and there are no equivelents. I hate it when people ask me if my Zen Vision M is an iPod though, it just isn't right.

Please Creative, build a patch to make the volume higher - the micro had really great volume highs but this is poor in comparison! Also it wouldn't hurt them to include a wall charger in the box contents - I mean it's not exactly cheap is it! Oh and the battery isn't replaceable - well it is but you have to take the unit apart. The Micro was cool for battery changes ... what's the deal here?

High cost, but overall the Creative ZEN Vision M is an amazing portable media player; I believe it is superior to the iPod video in every way; I would recommend this player to anyone who wants a player for travel and work (where applicable). This player will be a great purchase for at least another year. As an example, I traveled to Spain and the total 20 hours of flight time confirmed to me how valuable this player is and what it is capable of doing.

Simply the best on the market, you get what you pay for. If you are tired of compromising with the rest buy this!!