Payton H. Wilmott, Gleaner Writer

Creative's new player, simply named Zen, adds another powerful music devise to the Zen family of MP3 and media players. The Zen has a 16.7-million colour screen, making a noticeable difference to video playback and photo viewing. I was totally excited to review it and my expectations were certainly met when I saw the Zen in action.

The Good

SD card expansion slot, FM radio, voice recorder, and a user-definable EQ. User friendly.

The Bad

The Creative Zen only comes in black, and the control pad feels cheap.

Design

The Zen is slightly larger than a credit card and about the thickness of a Motorola Slvr. The player's exterior is made of plastic. The back has a matte finish that fends off nearly all possibilities of scratches. The front face of the player is made of a very hard glossy plastic. While still scratchable against harder metal objects, it is very resistant to scratches in typical use. If you are hard on your gadgets, you may want to get a screen protector or a case for your Zen. But if you handle with reasonable care, you should be able to avoid a scratched screen. Even with minor scratches on the screen, the bright LCD shines right though and does not impede your view. Although the front screen and buttons are very susceptible to showing fingerprints, it's nothing a wipe on your shirt won't fix.

Radio

FM radio reception at best was only mediocre to sub-par, but I found out that was dependent on the headphones I was using. The included earbuds seemed to work best, whereas more expensive headphones tended to give less-than-acceptable performance, but you should have no problem getting local stations on powerful frequencies with any headphone.

Photos

In addition to photos looking great in the 16.7-million colour screen, photo-viewing features are fairly extensive. Browsing is easy in either a thumbnail matrix or thumbnail list, including file names. Other photo options will allow you to rate photos, rotate photos, display properties, and zoom in on photos.

Audio

The Zen provides amazing sound quality when playing back mp3s.

Videos

The great looking screen lends to a very nice video viewing experience, but the video quality did fall a little short of my expectations since conversion is required.

Conclusion

The Creative Zen is a great option for anyone looking for a pure-sounding, pocket size MP3 player with an excellent, video-capable screen and plenty of extra features.

The products mentioned in this article were provided courtesy of Royale Computers and Accessories. Telephone#: 906-1067, 906-1068,749-5579.