Creative Zen Vision:M 60GB MP3 Player - Black (Internal Hard Drive, FM Tuner, 14 Hours)

• Reviewed by: hamutathmu

  Strengths: Big Storage, maximum 32GB, nice interface

  Weaknesses: Break down all the time

  Overall: Stay away from the RESET hole. My Zen lasted 6 months. It stopped booting up into the main screen. I pushed the hidden RESET HOLE as the maual recommends. The unit refused to to play after a few times pushing it. Customer service at Zen is horrible. They agreed to replace my Zen, however, I got the refurbished with scratchs all over and lasted for another 6 months. PLEASE STAY AWAY FROM THEM OR YOU'LL BE SORRY. I paid $300 on this PAPER WEIGHT Zen Vision M: 60GB.

• Reviewed by: z11111

  Strengths: Incredible sound quality, great flexibility and customization, hard drive storage, play wma+wmv+DivX+various other formats, FM radio, voice recording, great compression, everything ipod can do + more

  Weaknesses: Doesn't hold a great charge unless you use AC adaptor, very fragile, pet peeves in the firmware, etc; Only little things. Not as good as other Creative products.

  Overall: I have been a fan of Creative MP3 players since I bought my first in early 2005, a Creative Zen Touch 20GB. When my Zen Touch started to progress into breaking, I got this Vision:M in December.The Vision:M is a great, underappreciated rival to the iPod video. Sure, it isn't as slim and the screen is less than half an inch smaller, but it has more features built in than an iPod has ever had. For example, it plays the widest variety of video and music formats, such as WMA, MP3, and WAV for audio, and WMV, DIVX AVI, XVID for video. It has great compression formatting and good software. Has GREAT quality sound, with built in Equilizer. However, the only downside to this is the battery life, and the firmware. Creative's latest firmware is from December 06, and it is badly needing an upgrade for little things like tags and such. Also, the battery life does NOT last very long when you charge it via USB port, however, if you get an AC adaptor to charge it with, it works like a charm and holds a great charge.My Vision:M just recently died from liquid damage, and sadly, I'm replacing it with an 80gb iPod, for I need more space and I just got a Mac and the Vision:M isn't compatible with Mac, unless you use a tricky 3rd party software. Nonetheless, the Vision:M is a wonderful product that I would choose over the iPod video any day.

• Reviewed by: rocketgsx

  Strengths: Capacity,Sound Quality, Interface / Controls, Reliability

  Weaknesses: Size/Weight, can't think of any others!

  Overall: I have had the zen vision m 60 for a few weeks now and am overall very impressed with it. This is my first high capacity hard drive mp3 player. It is very convenient to be able to carry my entire music collection along at any given time, but I often do not use a very large portion of the total capacity. I mainly use this to listen to audio lectures from school which are recorded at very low bitrates, but the player has handled any high-def material, VBR, etc. that I have thrown at it. I don't really use the player for anything other than audio, but I must say that the screen is incredible! It is very bright and colorful with well laid out menus and controls. I have never owned an ipod and so cannot comment on pros/cons between the two but can't imagine that any ipod could surpass the Vision M, it's that good. I have owned many creative products over the years and have never had any problems at all, very well built and reliable. I have not yet run the battery completely down so I can't comment on batt. life, but it appears to be very good (I have used it for over 8 hours on a charge and it was not even close to dead). That said, I still have found myself using my Creative Zen V Plus 4Gb more often due to its smaller size and flash memory. I prefer the smaller size to take with me to the gym plus I worry a little bit about the rotating hard drive when running, etc. I use both of these creative products with a pair of creative bluetooth wireless headphones (SE2300) and they work great together! Overall you can't go wrong with creative. Find whatever product best suits your needs and you will not be disappointed!

• Reviewed by: lunaticfringe

  Strengths: Easy to use, large storage capacity, good sound and video quality, nice design (if that matters to you), plenty of bells & whistles, uses Windows Media player to add music

  Weaknesses: No AC adapter included, more accesories would be nice, Creative software enclosed is kinda tricky

  Overall: I'd been searching for an MP3 player since Christmas and did plenty of research before choosing this model. I'm still very happy with it. As of now, I have 30 albums (435 songs) stored with plenty of room to spare. The four user buttons aren't at all difficult to press. It's quite thick compared to an iPod, but that's not really important to me. It's still one hell of a piece. That said, if you use Media Player's "sync" feature to add content, set it to "manual." If you delete content from your PC that's been stored on your Zen, automatic syncing will remove it if you try adding more. Also, check creative's website for firmware updates.

• Reviewed by: babsbini

  Strengths: Lots of disk spaceGood sound qualityPretty fastGood battery lifeBright and clear screenSimple controlsUSB Host featureBuilt in FM RadioBuilt in Voice Recorder - Great recording quality

  Weaknesses: Slightly bulkyNot many accessories available

  Overall: With all the strengths that I have listed above it stands out amongst the bigger capacity MP3 players namely iPod, Zune and Zen. Yet, I think that this one is not my dream-machine. Before I had finalized between Zune, iPod and Zen, I had done a thorough study of their features. I believe that all popular MP3 players have a good sound quality. So I was not going to eliminate any of these on the basis of sound-quality. One of my foremost criteria was storage capacity and cost. The Zen provides 60 GB at a very competitive price. This was one feature on which the Zen beat the Zune in my opinion. I had heard that Zune has a bright and clear LCD. But I m certainly not disappointed by the quality of Zen's LCD. The colors on it are nice, bright and lively. The built-in FM radio is a definite plus, but Zune has this feature too. Another feature in which the Zen scored over the Zune was the voice recorder. And the mic on Zen is probably the best you could get in that tiny size! I almost sounded like a professional singer when I recorded some stuff on it! ;) I haven't used the USB host feature yet, but I think that its a great alternative to carrying a laptop when you are taking thousands of photos on a trip. Just transfer the photos to the player so that you can empty your camera's memory card for more photos. Somehow, Zen 60 GB does not have a lot of accessories in the market. I feel that a good case is a must-have for a MP3 player, and its not easy to find one for Zen 60 GB. Many websites claim that their leather cases fit both 30G and 60 GB. Don't be fulled by such a claim. I bought one such nice looking leather case, but its useless for my 60 GB. When I press one key on the player, all the keys get pressed because the leather case is too tight on it. My dream MP3 player would have been something like a regular MP3 player software, e.g.. Winamp or Real Media Player. One cannot create playlists on the player itself, though it can be done on the PC and then transferred onto the player. Another problem is one cannot view the actual filename of the audio file. Instead, one will see the title in the ID3 tags. I have all my MP3 files named as album name - title - artist. But this naming proves useless because the filename is not visible on the player. Yet another problem is one cannot queue the files to be played if the shuffle mode is selected. In Winamp, one can have the shuffle mode, and yet queue the files that should be played next by pressing the "Q" key. All in all, my dream MP3 player is yet to come out!