Review: Creative Zen MP3 player

WORTH A LOOK: The Creative Zen combines great sound and a good screen with a reasonable price.

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The Creative Zen is a nifty little Flash media player, with fantastic sound, an excellent screen for audio and video, and loads of neat extras and fine tuning.

The 2.5 inch TFT screen (capable of 16.7 million colours) on the Zen is great. Photos were clear, with rich colours, and video playback was basically flawless. When browsing the photo menu, the file you select is magnified so you can see it better, a nice touch.

Video can be converted with the included software.

Installation of the included software was bloody slow though, at least on my machine. It took about 15 minutes.

Next to the 2.5 inch screen are the controls, and there’s a lot of them. There’s the back button, a submenu button (song info, playlists, etc), play/pause, and an “album of the day” button that takes you to a random part of a random album.

Then there’s four direction buttons, which do different things on different screens.

The power and hold switch is on the side.

There are no dedicated volume button, which is a bit of a pain because there’s certainly space for it.

The controls take a bit of getting used to, because there’s a lot of buttons, but once you’ve got the hang of it you can do most things quickly.

Scrolling up and down lists is a bit slow, but Creative has made long lists easier to scroll by letting you flip down the letters by touching the central button.

The controls lack the elegance of an iPod clickwheel, but they get the job done.

Creative has a reputation for excellent sound quality in its MP3 players, and the Zen follows suit, though as usual you’d need a decent pair of headphones to know.

The sound was good across genres too, with tight bass on hip-hop tracks, crisp notes on jazz tracks, and clear vocals.

The voice recorder has a levels indicator on it, so you can check how far away you should be before you start recording. The quality of recording was generally pretty good.

You can add and take out selections from any menu and rank them how you like, which is a handy function, because one of the first things I did is add ‘Now Playing’ to the top of the main menu.

You can load up the Zen using Creative’s software, Windows Media Player or other digital jukeboxes, or drag and drop. File support is excellent, and it can handle MP3, WMA as well as many video codecs, including DivX. It even plays unprotected AAC files (the iTunesPlus versions, not regular iTunes songs).

There’s also an expansion slot for an SD card, so you can add more memory if you want it.

FM radio reception was good, with 32 pre-sets picked up by the autoscan. There is an alarm function and a calendar, which the Zen can sync with Microsoft’s Outlook (along with tasks and contacts)

The battery life is rated at 25 hours audio, 5 hours video, which is decent but not spectacular. It takes just a few seconds to boot up.

The 4GB model is cheaper than the equivalent iPod nano too.

The Creative Zen is $229 for 4GB, $329 for 8GB and $499 for 16GB (in any colour, as long as it’s black).