TrustedReviews Looks at the Zen Vision:M

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?head=39&page=5607' target='_blank'>http://www.trustedreviews.com/article.aspx?head=39&page=5607</a><br /><br /></div><i>"You’ve got to hand it to Creative. Or at least feel sorry for it. No sooner had it helped create the portable digital media player market with its Zen Jukebox, when Apple swept in relatively late in the game to sweep up all the plaudits with its iPod, the latest version of which I’ll be looking at tomorrow. To add insult to injury, it turns out that Creative even owns the patent on the interface that Apple used to such good effect - only Apple slapped a nifty wheel on the front of its device and the rest, as they say, is history. The sales figures speak for themselves. In the last quater of the year alone Apple sold over ten million iPods and according to some figures has a 65 per cent share on the hard drive based market. Creative, on the other hand, has around 2-4 per cent of the market...The Zen Vision: M though, is the best media player that Creative has yet released, so for the sake of keeping things interesting the market should be glad it hasn’t thrown in the towel yet."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/zen-visionm-trusted-reviews.jpg" /><br /><br />Another mostly positive review of the Zen Vision:M player: TrustedReviews gives it a 9 out of 10, although given the number of complaints the reviewer had I'm a little surprised it rated so highly. This is certainly looking like <i>the</i> player to get if you're not an iPod person.

[jeffd]

mmmm, looking at it, with its nice screen and as small as it fits in his hand in the pic, my interest in this is very peeked (piqued?). Currently I used my old dell pocket pc for movie playback and music, but the audio chip in it isnt all that great and the battery life (especialy the one in it thats 2 years old) is pretty sad. I think soon I may just up and get one of these, even if it isn't 640x480 yet.

I find it funny any one would care weather it was 30 gigs or 60 gigs.. at 4 hours, thats like just under 2 gigs of 640x480 resolution content. If you used 320x240 formated content, then much less. Either way id have more video and audio content on it then I would battery life by far. ;)

Now to find out if when and how much its selling over here in the US.

edit: Nmind, found it on amazon for $330, a bit high, but still I may consider it.

[Kacey Green]

I've been saving for one of these ever since I dropped my zen micro

[Jason Dunn]

I find it funny any one would care weather it was 30 gigs or 60 gigs.. at 4 hours, thats like just under 2 gigs of 640x480 resolution content. If you used 320x240 formated content, then much less. Either way id have more video and audio content on it then I would battery life by far.

I don't think the size is just for the amount that you can watch/listen in the four hours of video battery life - for most people, they want to carry their entire audio collection with them, so if you have more than 30 gigs (I do) you'd want the 60 gig model. I thought I'd be fine with the 30 gig model, but I was surprised at how quickly I filled it up once I started ripping DVDs and converting TV shows. Bring on the bigger models I say!

[jeffd]

hmm, how big are your dvd's being ripped at file size wise? I didn't really notice due to most of what I download being anime and tv shows, but I downloaded a few dvd rips (my method of "renting" a movie ;) ) rescently and was shocked when you can actually do a 2 ish hour movie in 700megs with awsome quality in divx (well, xvid to be exact). A couple years ago, with divx 3 and 4, a 1cd movie was still just a step above vhs, and resolution was usualy around 512x286 (WS) or something like that. Now peeps use 720x(what ever, with the black bars removed) and while some still do 2cd cause they want dvd quality, I've seen some amazing 1cd rips now.

I've read some more reviews on the zen:m and I think I've found my device. Pretty much everyone had no problem playing their downloaded movies without the need to convert, and everyone was raving about its audio quality. While I am a bit nurvouse as to how readable my anime's subtitles will be on it (Mainly my question is, does it use a high quality filtering when resizing to 320x240?) but I want it as an mp3 player as much as I do a PMP, and the size really appeals to me (the 3.5 inch pmp's are just a little to big, silly large front mounted controls and such, built in speakers) so if I still need to convert my anime manually (like I do now for my pocket pc) then I will still be happy.

[Jason Dunn]

hmm, how big are your dvd's being ripped at file size wise?

The last DVD I ripped was 1 hour 28 minutes long, 320 x 240 DivX 750 kbps, ended up being 551 MB.

[Kacey Green]

Bring on the bigger models I say!

I agree, but I thought there were no immediate plans to make this in 60GB but they didn't rule it out.

***long quote trimmed by moderator JD. Please trim your quotes, thanks! ***

[Kacey Green]

on my system dvix comes out to about 1.9 gigs an hour. at auto quality settings down from DVD quality mpeg2

[mcsouth]

I agree about the bigger sizes - as soon as you start talking about video, the space goes quickly. I would probably have my audio downsampled (transcoded?) from the WMA Lossless that it is on my PC to 192 kbps or so - that should save quite a bit of space over the 35 GB or so that my music takes up on my PC.

Video......I'm obviously not a purist, since I tend to use PocketDvixEncoder to convert ripped VOB's to a nice small 320x240 video that runs nicely on my PPC. Default bitrate is 248kbps, although I often take it up over 300 kbps, and take the audio up to 16 bit stereo (80 kbps) minimum - I'm still looking for the sweet spot between image quality and file size.

Most of my full length DVD's run to about 250MB; I'd transcode them at a higher quality level, although I only have a 512MB card yet, so need to keep them small. If I had a player like this (or the 2 GB SD card that I've been eyeing...), then I would definitely be encoding at a higher bitrate.

Either way, you may only be able to play 4 GB or so with one charge, but if I'm on the road for a couple of weeks, I definitely want to have lots of content. Funny how watching a video on my PPC screen at 320x240 is more attractive than finding something on TV - tells you about my opinion of the state of TV today!