Creative Zen Vision W user reviews (60GB)

3.5 stars

"reasonably good, but lacking in some simple areas" on April 11, 2007 by SeverAMV

Pros: big clear screen with good colour support (altho it does lack a genuine grey scale, often greys look blue-ish), wide video format support, better battery life than claimed

Cons: occasional crashing (happened before with all creative devices i've owned), doesnt actually support zencast videos directly, requires conversion for them to work (bummer from creative), bad support

Summary: the device is a relatively good mp4 player aside from some really bad cons.
the pros are that it supports a wide variety of video formats, including xvid and divx which means it will pretty much play anything you download from the internet.
it also has better battery life than claimed by creative.
and the screen is very much crystal clear, although it generally lacks a proper greyscale as the colour support is only a little higher than 16 bit (the greyscale loss is really noticeable as greys start looking like blues, and it isnt fixed by outputting to a tv either).
however, despite its wide video format support, i was shocked to find out that the device doesnt actually support files downloaded directly from creative zencast, it still undergoes the tedious conversion process (and its still in the same format after conversion). this is rather annoying as it detracts from its out of the box entertainment ability. and for those who are still using old computers, the conversion process can take quite a long time. i've also had some problems with copying videos without the creative media explorer installed, mainly that they wont work on the player unless copied with the media explorer. aside from this, the format support is generally well done.
the player has some occasional crashes that is common with most of the players that i've tested from creative. my first creative mp3 player was a dmpmx200 that, after installation of the 1.3a firmware, would crash whenever i plugged it into a new computer, and would require a forced reset that most people would be unaware of. the device also created power surges in some usb ports which was problematic for me. i experienced similar problems with a creative zen v plus, and although the zen vision w crashes are relatively infrequent, it is still annoying as you have to remove the battery, reboot the device, and wait for it to recatalog all media.
another problem, altho relatively minor, is that the screen does not turn off when connected to a charger, which can slow down charging a bit.
another main problem is that it doesnt really work too well as a portable storage device, as once you copy a file to a location on the player, you cant relocate the file without removing it from the player and then recopying, and if you're using a usb 1.1 port, this can be ultra tedious. it also doesnt let you run files directly from the player, and requires you to copy files to the computer (really annoying for those 1.4 gigabyte movies). hopefully this will be fixed with a later firmware update.
the other problem is that although generally speaking, creative offer decent product support, they dont offer previous updates. this can be a key problem as some firmware updates may introduce problems that you would rather live without. some of these problems are not present in older firmware revisions so it would be nice to have access to older firmware downloads somewhere. creative warranty also isnt universal, its only valid in the country the device was originally distributed too. so if you bought it on ebay, you may want to look into this, i was quoted a $55AU fee for repair of a product that was originally damaged in the box.

but if you can overlook all the downsides, this device is a very functional portable video player with many features. hopefully all the bugs will be fixed with later updates.