Creative Zen 20Gb - thumbs up!
Written: Feb 17 '04
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Pros: I had to put 20 words here or it wouldn't let post the review.
Cons: I had to put 20 words here or it wouldn't let post the review.
The Bottom Line: Great little unit. should last a long time and you can fill your entire album collection in it
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| xen_100's Full Review: Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox Zen (20 GB) MP3 Player |
I have owned the Zen 20Gb for about 2 months now. Overall I would have to say that I very please with it. It is a very well made, solid feeling unit. The sound it incredible. You can tell a company that specializes in makes sound devices made this. The output of the unit very good. Volume can well exceed the levels I like to listen to music, even in a noisy environment like my work.
It comes with an included case to protect the finish of the Zen, which is very nice. The anodized aluminum is a nice touch, plus very durable. The buttons are either silvery covered plastic or they are actually metal. Either way, I haven't noticed that any signs of wear (like a painted plastic might show)
Pros:
Smallish: True it is not as small as its stick memory counterparts. But considering that you have about 40x the memory as a 512-Mb stick, I can overlook this slight downside.
Great sound: as good if not better than even a very expensive CD player. The graphic EQ works great. You can over eq the bass if you try (on bass heavy music) but it does put out alot of sound for such a compact unit
Transfer speed: USB2.0. What more can I say 400 BPS. You can queue up ALOT of music and transfer it very fast.
Transfer content: you can transfer back off the unit to your harddrive. This is a feature that some other MP3 players do not allow. It also doubles as a portable harddrive. You do have to install the driver, which is a bit of a pain. But the entire driver and program fits on a floppy. So you don’t have to keep the cd with you.
File (or music) organization: very good. The OS is really fast to respond to button pushes. The way the music is stored makes it very easy to find what you are looking for. You can search by artist, album, genre (useless, since most genres are not standardized. Even within a certain artist, the genre will change from album to album) or even use the handy "find" function. Using the little roller wheel you can search through all the menus with one hand. You do have to be carefully though. It seems the faster you spin the wheel, the farther it goes.
Display: the display is a nice size. It displays all the necessary info while searching for or playing music.
Battery life: this is one people complain about. But on mine, it says that it will play for about 13 hours on a charge. That is about what I get. It takes about 3 hours to charge. It will charge off the supplied powersuply, or it will charge off a USB port (unit must be turned off though)
Cons:
Headphones: useless. Very cheesy. But what do you want? They are free and included. Go get yourself a nice pair of SennHeiser phones and you are set to take full advantage of the great sound this unit has to offer.
S/W: the creative SW is not bad. It does hang up alot if you just plug the Zen into your computer. You can close it and restart it and it seems to work fine. It will not read the ID3 tags at all. If you don’t have an internet connection you will type in your entire artist, album, genre info yourself. If you do have an internet connection, the Gracenote CDDB works great. Haven’t had a CD yet that wasn't in there. The ripping engine that creative has is so-so. If the CD is new and doesn't have any errors on it, then it works great. But it does tend to cause pops, and glitches on some CDs. An aftermarket ripping program will solve this for about $20.
For only $220 or so that you can find this unit for, it is a VERY good buy. You can put about 4500 songs on this unit when encoded with WMA at 96Kbs. That is ALOT of songs. Try to find a stick memory player with more than 256Mb for that price.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 220
Recommended for: Music Lovers - High Capacity Storage for an Entire Album Collection
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Epinions.com ID:
xen_100
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