Good product

Have had this for almost a year now.

Pros:
The battery life is good.
FM radio and recording.
Video out.
Removable battery
Can also double as a portable hard disk for photos during travel (bought the flash card adapter for SD card use)

Cons:
The video angle can get irritating as you have to look straight at it but when (if) found, its very good (but not as good as PSP)

I would recommend this over the iPod as I've used both. Its also easier (and MUCH faster) to transfer videos to the Zen than to the iPod.


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I Love This Thing!

I am very impressed by the Multimedia player, especially with the image (video) quality. It is a little heavy to carry around, but it has worked great for me using it in rental cars with a cassette adapter, and in various hotel and cruise cabins with the portabale speaker system. I have found the controls and menus to be easy to work thru, and easy to see. I am not sophisticated by any means, and still learning, but this unit is easy to use, and maintenance is a non-issue. Battery life isn't as the company predicted, but I got at least 6.5 hours of driving time out of it, and that was enough.

Storage of music is tremendous, and quite possibly more than I would ever be able to use, but as a portable storage device for transferring pics over a long vacation, it fills the need in me.

The problems with the unit are that it does freeze up at times, but very, very rarely during playback. Mostly it hangs up when I am downloading to the unit, or is not recognized by the PC, which has happened frequently. Once I retry, after a day or so, it loads up as though nothing had ever happened. This is disruptive, especially when you are under the gun and trying to load up before a trip, and has occured at those times, 3 times in a row. Still wouldn't give up the unit though. The biggest problem I have is not really with the unit per se, but with how the music is loaded and displayed in the folders. I guess it is related to the Tagging of the music, and needs to be cleaned up (which is really labor intensive, so free music really isn't free).

Tried to purchase accessories from Creative but, they fell down on the job because of relocation of their warehouse, or so they said. Other than that, they were pretty good at explaining any issues with the unit within the first 30 days.

Would I purchase again? Yes. But would like the pricing to be more competitive. But I have to tell you, the video quality is superb, and if you are going to load quality video, then, this is the unit to get.

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Definitely Worth the Money!

I asked for the Zen Vision for my birthday. I chose this one versus the Apple iPod because of the larger screen to watch movies, removable battery and built in FM radio and voice recorder. My parents were a little bit wary of buying it for me - saying that they only say the point of listening to music and $390 was a lot to pay for gift. However, once I got it, it was definitely worth the money.

First of all, it was a lot smaller and lighter than I expected. I kind of thought it would be big and bulky, but it was light enough to be comfortable in my hand as well as small enough to fit in my front pocket. I compared it to my older brother's 3G iPod (40GB and clickwheel), and the Zen stacked up nicely. It was slightly thinner, but also longer and wider (which is expected because one of the assets of this player is the size of the screen). As soon as I turned it on, I found it was incredibly easy to use. The menus are really simple to use, and the buttons are natural.

The software was easy to install, and the nice thing is that the Zen synchs automatically with windows media player. And, within an hour, my Zen had all my songs, videos and photos. The sound quality is superb! Not to mention the video and picture quality. The screen is beautiful, and my home videos have never looked so good! The radio reception is a little sketchy, and the voice recorder isn't top grade, but they're both acceptable. There's really no problem at all.

I've had my Zen for about a day now, and I couldn't be happier. I'm having some trouble putting movies on it, since the included software doesn't convert DVDs. (BTW, the included Media Center Software isn't that useful - but luckily you can perform all the same tasks on Windows Media Player, which I do.) I took another reviewer's advice and am using a third party software to copy the DVDs to my computer. Hopefully that'll work! But overall, the battery life is great, and everything Creative Labs promises is here. I highly reccomend this product. Much better than an iPod Video!

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