Creative Zen 4 GB Portable Media Player (Black)

by Creative Labs

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches ; 8 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B000UV4EU6
• Item model number: 70PF216200111
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (901 customer reviews)
• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #10,780 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 7, 2004

Product Description

Capacity: 4 GB

Amazon.com Product Description

Bring your media with you wherever you roam with the Creative Zen 4GB player. Watch 16 hours of videos, enjoy up to 1,000 of your favorite songs or share hundreds of photos with your friends. And do it all on a device that's about the width of a credit card.

A razor sharp 2.5-inch display makes your photos and videos come to life. See the Zen in detail.

Small size. Big features. All in the palm of your hand. View larger.

Add even more storage capacity via the SD card slot. View larger.

Design
The Zen sports a 2.5-inch TFT color display with 320 x 240-pixel resolution and support for up to 16.7 million colors. This razor sharp display is packaged in a device that weighs just 2.1 ounces and measures 3.26 x 2.16 x .44 inches (W x H x D). The internal battery powers the Zen for up to 25 hours of continuous audio playback and up to five hours of continuous video playback. Use the Zen's SD slot to expand your portable media library with music, photos and videos stored on your SD card. There's also a handy built-in microphone for capturing notes on the go.

Features
Load up up your favorite songs, as well as your album art, and get going with the Zen. The device supports iTunes Plus tracks from the iTunes store and MP3 and WMA tracks. Subscription and pay-per-download music services are supported, as well. Discover, save, and play millions of songs when subscribing to services such as Yahoo Music Unlimited and Napster To Go. You can even tune into your favorite stations with the Zen's FM radio. The radio allows you to save up to 34 presets.

The Zen has you covered when it comes to video, too. The device supports MJPEG, WMV9 and--with transcoding--MPEG1 and 2, MPEG4-SP, DivX 4 and 5, and XviD. Enjoy purchased movies and TV shows from online services, such as Amazon Unbox and Walmart.com. Watch home videos. Even load your Tivo To Go movies and TV shows onto your Zen.

Additional features include a clock and alarm function, volume restriction, eight equalizer settings, and a USB hard drive mode, which allows you to drag and drop files directly to and from your Zen. The Zen can also function as a handy organizer, allowing you to synchronize with Microsoft Outlook and display your contacts, calendar, and tasks.

What's in the Box
Zen player, earphones, USB 2.0 cable, installation CD, and quick start guide.

A slick user interface makes it a snap to enjoy your media.

Product Description

This credit card-sized ZEN has a stunning 2.5" color screen and is perfect for music, videos and photos. Enjoy up to 4,000 MP31, WMA or AAC songs, watch up to 60 hours2 of videos and share hundreds of photos with your friends. Even expand your portable music, video or photo collection by adding additional content through the convenient SD memory slot.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

352 of 357 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best flash player on the market, great even for large music collections, December 1, 2007

By	Harvey Ramos "Geek" (Springfield, VA USA) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Creative Zen 16 GB Portable Media Player (Black) (Electronics)

This is a great choice for those people who previously limited their flash players to workout duty, or only holding a small piece of their large music collection and having to change the music on it every so often. With a 16GB capacity most people can fit their entire collection on here without difficulty, and even have room for some videos.

First impressions of this player are very good. It is extremely appealing to the eye, everyone who sees it will ask about it. It is about the size of a credit card, just thicker (less than 1/2inch). The front is a very glossy black plastic that looks great until you touch it, instantly covering it with fingerprints :) The back is a rough, cheaper feeling black plastic. Overall it has a nice solid weight and feel to it, but not very heavy. This will easily fit in a pocket.

The 2.5" screen is absolutely gorgeous. Very bright with vivid colors. The viewing angle is very good, two people can easily look at the screen at the same time while watching a movie for example. The menus are all nicely animated and intuitive to navigate. The icons and text are big clear and easy to read.

One of the big perks to having so much capacity is plenty of room for videos. This was one of the first things I've tested as it was a big reason for my purchase. First of all it DOES play Amazon Unbox videos perfectly. Transferring files was very easy (just a few clicks) and very quick. The quality of the video was great as well. The max size of videos is apparently 320x240, I have not been able to get it to play anything larger than that. If the video is smaller (for example widescreen) you have the option of playing it at the correct aspect ratio, or fill the screen (stretched out). I've gotten it to play videos encoded in Xvid and WMV format. Xvid files were encoded with AutoGK, and the WMV files were encoded with Arcsoft MediaConverter. If you synchronize with Windows Media Player, you can put in *almost any* video file and it will automatically convert the file into WMV format and then transfer to the player. How long it takes to convert depends on the type of video you're encoding, how big the file is and of course the speed of your computer.

Music sounds very good on this player, but please... get rid of the stock headphones they are horrible. Using a decent pair of headphones makes a HUGE difference. The EQ options are OK, there are about a half dozen presets and a customizable EQ. The "Bass Boost" option just made it worse in my opinion, it just distorted the sound. Otherwise it is a very even and balanced sound, very similar to the Vision:M.

The FM radio has a whopping 32 presets and the reception is pretty good. Strong stations are in stereo, weaker ones come in mono. I haven't had a chance to test out the built-in mic.

I easily transferred music and playlists onto this player from Windows Media Player and MediaMonkey, as well as protected music (WMA) from Napster. Everything was very easy, usually just dragging and dropping. The speed of transfer is probably the fastest I've seen. I've used this player on XP Home and on Vista Premium 64-bit.

Regarding the SD cards. I think its only a slight inconvenience that the memory card media isn't directly integrated with the other content. Meaning if you have videos on the SD card you don't go to the "Video" menu where all the other videos are, you have to access them through the "Memory Card" menu. Once there, you browse through the file structure like normal. If you organize the content smartly on your cards you should have no problem. And really its a small price to pay for that feature. Currently SDHC cards are up to 16GB in capacity, meaning you could double the capacity and carry around 32GB worth of content in your pocket. Amazing. I tested a Kingston 512MB SD Card and a Kingston 2GB microSD card (with adapter of course) and they were recognized and played the content without difficulty.

A quick note about the firmware. Mine came with 1.10.05. When my player turns off, it really turns off. With newer firmwares when it turns off it goes into a sleep mode for a while before it finally turns all the way off. What that means is with the older firmware each time you turn it on it has to "boot" all over again, whereas with the newer firmware you get an "instant-on" at the expense of slightly reduced battery life (since it is asleep and not off). Something to consider before you decide to upgrade the firmware.

203 of 209 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Player, October 30, 2007

By	G. Carini (Los Angeles, California) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Creative Zen 16 GB Portable Media Player (Black) (Electronics)

This is an all around solid MP3 Player. I will describe some of the pros and cons about this player. I will say right now the pros strongly outweigh the cons. I have also tested this player adequately and have tested the SD card slot which I find very nice. Despite some complaints about the SD card, I find it adequate to suit my needs.

By the way if you are wondering why I am publishing this review... I received the player from Creative where it is in stock. Amazon is taking a little while longer.

Pros:

1) Excellent Sound - This MP3 Player is a bit louder, and sounds better than my previous Vision:M. I think the sound quality is quite superb.
2) Bright, Brilliant Display - The display is just stunning, and the 16 million colors really show great improvement over the ZVM.
3) Easy Navigation - I love the navigation on this player, and I really love the different themes.
4) Videos - The videos look incredibly nice... I've only played a few
5) Transfer Speed - Extremely Fast! What can I say? This is what has surprised me the most. The speed is an extremely huge difference over hard-drive based players.
6) Good Button Placement - Though small for some, I do happen to like the buttons
7) Nice looks - I really like the looks of this (this is very subjective)
8) Small Size - This is a very light player, that is only a foot print of what the ZVM was. The most amazing part is that the screen is 2.5" inches.

Cons:

1) Power Adapter - It should come with one, but it only comes with a USB power cable (which is acceptable)
2) Crappy Ear phones - Eh. Buy the Creative EP-630. You don't buy a nice player and use the provided ear phones. The EP-630 are an incredible set.
3) Buttons are a bit hard to push at first - This is something others have experienced... this is true for a while.
4) Can smudge - to prevent this get the plastic case!

How does this stack up against an ipod?

It crushes it in my mind. I really think Creative did a fine job here, and I'm sure firmware will be updated constantly knowing Creative's attention to the customer.

Edit: Added a few things.

155 of 159 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars SDHC compatible, October 10, 2007

By	Jeff Rutsch (Oakland, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Creative Zen 4 GB Portable Media Player (Black) (Electronics)

MP3 players have turned into a commodity. They're not terribly expensive, they sound fine, they're very small, they're easy to use. There's really not much to say, and even Apple is tying them in to web browsers and cell phones and video players, to make them stand out.

The big advantage of this player against the Nano (the obvious competitor) is that SD/SDHC cards allows a measure of expandability. I got the 4 GB version of the player; it's the smallest version but it still lets me put my favorite 60 albums or so on the player. If I want to listen to other albums, I put them on a spare SD card and pop the card in the player, it's easy.

Of course this will be more and more of an advantage - right now, 8GB SD cards cost about half as much as this player, and I'm sure over the next year 16 and 32 GB SD cards will get released, at comparable prices. I have a very large music collection, I like the idea of being able to stick a very large collection on a very small player.

The interface for this device is, like the iPod, pretty good but not great - sometimes you feel like you're working against the menu system. The worst fault is, music on the SD card is put in a separate list than the music on the device's internal memory - it's a little clunky, if not terrible. Also annoying is that the player takes about 10 seconds to boot up, whereas the iPod turns on instantly.

The screen quality is very, very good, the included videos look excellent - on the other hand, it's a small screen for watching a movie, and converting a normal .avi file to the required format requires a couple hours. So except in special circumstances I don't expect to be doing that often.

The battery lasts a very long time, and charges quickly off USB. The sound quality is pretty good, and I've heard it's better than the Nano, but I haven't done any direct comparisons so I can't really say.

Also, be sure to update the firmware off the Creative site, it only takes a few seconds. The firmware as shipped would constantly crash when I accessed the SD card. After the update I haven't had a problem once.

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