Creative Zen Vision First Look

Creative Technology, at the beginning of August 2005, introduced a new portable video player to the market which looks very cool and offers up a host of impressive features. Meet the Zen Vision, a slender, sleek machine which will allow you to listen to music, watch video and view photos.

The Zen Vision features a 3.7” high resolution 640 x 480 color screen which is transreflective, meaning it can provide good image and video quality under bright sunlit conditions. The Zen Vision hosts a 30GB hard drive within its 4.9” x 2.9” x .8 inch body, which will allow this portable audio and video player to hold up to 15,000 songs, tens of thousands of photos and up to 120 hours of video.

Audio:

Music playback on the Zen Vision comes at up to 97dB SNR, which is great for you non technical music lovers out there. It supports music subscriptions from services such as Napster and Yahoo Music Unlimited and can playback audio files of the MP3 and WMA types. It also has a built-in FM radio with 32 preset options, as well as the ability record live FM broadcasts.

Photos and Video:

Photo viewing is another strong suite of a device like the Zen Vision. Besides storing tens of thousands of JPEGs, these photos can be shared with others either on the player’s screen or outputted to a television screen. Photo slide shows can be created and set to music, which can be listened to through the player’s speaker or headphone jack. A Compact Flash card slot allows people the ability to transfer photos to the Zen Vision for viewing.

Video playback is the third part of the Zen Vision trifecta. This portable video player supports a wide range of video formats, including MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Simple Profile formats such as DivX and Xvid, WMV, and MJPEG. The Zen Vision also supports TiVoToGo, for viewing of TV content recorded on a TiVo personal video recorder, and digitized home movies transferred from the PC.

Other useful features of the Zen Vision include a removable, rechargeable battery, built-in microphone for making voice recordings, organizer functionality which can sync with Microsoft Outlook, a musical alarm clock and support of USB 2.0 for high speed file transfers.

The Zen Vision is available in black or white through Creative’s website for $399.99 and comes with the rechargeable battery, AC adapter, USB 2.0 cable, earphones, AV cable and protective pouch.