The last time Creative made a PMP it was a big beastie with more bulk than beauty, which meant no matter how good the picture no one was going to lug it around town. The good news is that the new Zen Vision is a far more eye-catching device, it comes in a choice of Black of White and we strongly recommend you go with black, the vision in white is about as stylish as an Essex girls handbag in a Romford Discothèque.

The major selling point of this Zen PMP is its large 3.7" TFT screen which is quite stunning and for once its not crippled with a pants resolution either, Creative bless the Vision with the full 640 x 480 pixels and 262K colours. This makes for a sharp and crisp image with good colour reproduction, it puts the AV700 to shame in pure image quality, however we did note that the angle of acceptance is quite sharp, so that you have to watch it straight on. This isn't really a big problem but does mean its very much video for one and your mate can't share.

This model is a 30gb hard drive one and can store a fair amount of movies / pictures and audio tracks depending on the compression rates. The unit supports a number of formats including DivX, M-JPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Simple Profile, WMV, and XviD, however our tests showed that the vast majority had to be run through the supplied conversion software to play reliably, WM9/10 was about the only format that worked on a straight transfer. Moving to audio the support for formats seems more backwards with just MP3, WAV and WMA and no chance of ACC, or Ogg Vorbis.

Having moaned about the format support we do have to compliment Creative on the replay quality and reliability once files are passed over as WMV's, we tested full length movies and shorter music videos which all played smoothly and looked great on the 3.7" screen and the only compression artefacts were from the original encode. The screen seems to be highly reflective, which makes it look cool, sadly this also makes it a nightmare to use in direct sunlight or with strong overhead lights.

Audio should be a strong point but was an area where we were disappointed, firstly there is only a single inbuilt speaker which is very quiet and not useable in anything other than a silent room. So you switch to the supplied ear buds which are ok but at high audio levels we found some distortion which is only magnified should you be foolish enough to use the EQ settings. The distortion remained even when we tested using a set of Shure headphones so it seem its the audio replay that's at fault which is bad news for anyone who wants the Zen Vision for MP3 playback.

Getting media onto your Zen is performed via USB 2.0 and is a speedy affair, the supplied Media source software is ok but we managed quite happily with Windows Media player 10 and its portable device sync, in fact this is a very simple method of pushing media to your device and also checking your WMV files. There is an option of a dock to sit your Zen Vision in which keeps thing a bit tidier, its a shame that for this kind of money Creative don't just bundle it all together.

There is a smattering of extras with a handy FM radio a CF card slot for sucking those pictures from a digital camera (although no MMC or SD slot) and there is a basic PIM type application which can keep your appointments and contacts but its no PDA.

Battery life is a mixed affair with us only managing 3.5 hours video playback and a very poor 10 hours audio playback (creative claim 13 hours for audio) so perhaps another sign that if all you are after is audio then buy an MP3 player! However this is really missing the point, the Creative Zen Vision does perform its basic replay task very well and we thoroughly enjoyed watching Shrek on its large screen, we could complain that it has no video record features, but then we much prefer to record media on a PC and push it to a device. Also almost every record capable PMP we have tested has had a very clunky interface and messy cable set-up.

At £350 it's at the top end of the price range for PMP's but with such a good screen and a very useable navigation system it does warrant the extra cash, 30gb is a bit stingy we'd have liked to see 40gb at least on this model. However we can recommend the Zen Vision to those who want to watch movies and other video files in WMV format, those who hate converting files or who would use the Zen as an audio player should steer clear.

Published - 18/12/2005

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