Comment: After having 2 replacements under warranty, the last one died a couple of weeks ago aswell. Unfortunatly this one was no longer under warranty (2 years old). I have allways been very carefull with it so it never has been dropped or anything like that, but apparently it now has a broken harddrive. On the internet I have seen that lot's of people have (had) the same problem.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Creative Review
Comment: Order came in three days, product works as expected. I have many playlists, movies,and about 100 audio books already downloaded.
Bought used but it's in perfect condition with good battery life.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The best Mp3 player on the market....
Comment: Are you looking for the ipod killer? Are you sick of buying Mp3 players that die after a few months? Look no further, I've owned a few Zen players since they first started releasing Nomad's and guess what, they all still work perfectly, including my 6 year old Nomad. Creative knows how to make a sleek looking, high quality mp3 player. Back to the Vision: M, I have dropped it a few times on a wooden floor and concrete and the worst that happened was a minor scratch on the corner. There are so many good things about this player but my favorite part is the TV-out. If you buy the TV-out RCA cables, you can plug your Vision into your television, but now you're thinking, "Ok well....Ipods can do that." Yea, they can, but Ipods also compress and convert videos just so they can fit on your Ipod. With a Vision: M I can download full length DivX encoded movies, and drag them straight onto the player like a regular folder on a drive, plug it into the TV and boom I have almost dvd quality on my TV. Now everytime I goto a friends house they ask me to bring my Vision so they have something new to watch. Also I'm not sure if this still applies but when the Vision: M first came out, it also had more colors on screen than Ipods. If I had to bring up some negatives about this player it would be hard, but I can say the biggest one is it's size. For me, I'm not using this while I go jogging, I use it for video out more than mp3 playback, but if you were planning on being on the move a lot and are used to a very thin player, this might not be right for you. I have owned this player for just about a year now and the biggest problem I've had was it freezing, all you do is hit the reset and it's fine, that has probably happened 3 times...TOTAL. It even has a built-in scan disk, a microphone, and an fm radio. Do yourself a favor, invest well, skip the Ipod's and pick up a Vision, even if it's one of the lower models, I can guarantee a Creative mp3 player will last longer than an Apple mp3 player. The reason why is simple, Apple designs their products to fail after a short period of time so people are forced to upgrade. You don't get to be on top by writing checks...
Customer Rating:
Summary: Solid Player just no good software for it.
Comment: The player itself is an all-right unit... The Creative software is buggy and crash prone and will not install onto a XP SP3 machine. As with Creative hardware is is all-ready abandoned by the company. The ZenCast software runs properly on very rare occasions. Once the media is on the player all is well, getting it there is the nightmare.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A great, great, great portable media player
Comment: Okay, I really don't want to jump into the middle of the on-going name-calling contest going on between ipod people and ipod bashers. I WILL say that when I began buying portable MP3 players many years ago I did a lot of research before purchasing and Creative always seemed to have a product in the category I was looking for that seemed a better bargain than the competition. The company is still going strong many generations of devices later, and the Zen Vision M is frankly amazing. When my ipod friends see it they ask enviously "what is THAT?" and when they see what it can DO they get kind of a sour grapes look on their face and say "ahhhh..." I tell them not to despair, they can get one too, especially since you can get them for a fraction of the ipod.
I used to feel sorry for people who compared the video capability of devices with screens the size of postage stamps. I don't want to watch videos and show off family pictures on THAT. But the Vision M has a 2.5 inch screen, and while that's not going to push my plasma out of the way, it's completely suitable for watching movies on planes and showing off pictures of the kids. The picture looks amazing - seriously, with plasma-like quality. The resolution and colors are realistic and vibrant.
This brings up another great feature of the Vision M: it isn't stumped by proprietary media. Where other devices require you to buy music specifically from THEM, in THEIR format, the Vision will play every type of music or video file I know. Amazon touts the fact that the Vision is the only device that will play their "Unbox" videos - "thousands of movies, TV shows and international videos". Cool.
There's a 30 and a 60 GB version of this player. That is a ridiculous size for photos, a SERIOUS amount of music and a respectable number of videos. The interface is intuitive, although it might take awhile to find all the things the Vision can do. The touch-bar in the center takes the place of the famous ipod "wheel", and it is just as fast. Navigation is a snap.
Creative doesn't pay me, so I have no reason to prefer their products other than that they seem to work better and less expensively than their competitors.
