The Creative Zen Vision M:

So this is technically my first real blog that I have written, so first a little about me, my name is Danny and I am the owner of Rampant Designs which has just recently relaunched, I also do some work on various other sites including Baby Seal Productions, but enough of that and onto the topic at hand.

The Creative Zen Vision M:

what wikipedia says

To be honest the zen vision m: is without a doubt the best purchase I have ever made, when I look at the cometitors such as the ipod, the zune, sony's walkmans some random rip off design from ebay, I never seem to have any interest or think what if I owned one of these.

My first MP3 player and also my first creative experience was :





The Creative Muvo

This was an awesome MP3 player, it only had 128MB memory and cost the equivalent of what I paid for the 30GB Zen Vision M: but at the time 128MB was a standard and MP3 players with HDD where an idea for the future. Sadly I misplaced this one day and after countless hours searching I gave in and bought a new one from ebay, it was a unknown company and cheap, at first it went fine and a friend of mine really liked it and the fact it was cheap so he ordered one, sadly about 2 weeks after his arrived it fell apart and mine didn't last much longer either, thankfully when moving house I located my Muvo and ever since I have never bought an MP3 player that didn't carry the creative name, which brings me to my next awesome purchase in 2003:

The Creative Xtra


Okay:

Was it the best looking? no
Could the weight cause future back problems? probably
How big was it? About the size of a small laptop

Then you would probably ask why buy it, well quite simply something drew me to it, maybe the fact it was a portable weapon (the thing could leave a dent on a road if you drop it), the fact I had heard nothing but good about creatives MP3 players but whatever it was, the Xtra was one of the best things I have owned, infact even after replacing this I still have the Xtra lieing on a shelf by my room door.

This now brings us too the Zen Vision M:, without a doubt the best multimedia player I have used, its fairly priced comes in 30GB and 60GB versions and a range of colors (although when I bought mine it had just recieved a uk release so I got the black 30GB model, still probably the one I would have chosen.), it has alot of good features such as the TV Out, I bought the cables for less than £10 off ebay and the picture quality is just unbelievable even on a video formatted for the zen vision m: screen it looks great on a widescreen tv. Theres also the whole compatibility issue, while the zen isn't compatible with itunes, unlike the ipod its compatible with pretty much every other download service.

Also the Zen is compatible with a various range of file formats and for any videos which I have tried and found incompatible this handy software always seems to do the trick for converting them for me.

Also while personally I never use 'podcasting' there is a version for the zen called Zen Cast which while not huge does have content for your zen.


Overall my expetrience with the Creative Zen Vision M: and Creative in general has been awesome, I have had no issues and I quite honestly don't see that changing anytime soon, if you are looking for a multimedia player then don't get with the crowd and buy an ipod, take the smart root to the zen vision m:, I know people who own ipods and others who own the zen and while the zen owners remain civilised when you mention the player, the ipod owners seem to talk with contempt when they mention the ipod.

Sites to check out:

Rampant Designs Baby Seal Productions Stick Guy The Club BSP Blog Stick Guy Blog