Creative Zen V Plus

Reviews: Multimedia

Creative Zen V Plus

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Mark Korff
Kurtis
N/A
May. 10, 2007

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Testing

Despite its small size, the Zen V Plus has a lot of different features for us to talk about, so let's get started. First of all, let's talk about playing music files, since that's probably the most important. As mentioned previously, the Zen can be synched via multiple different programs, either the ones provided by Creative, or third party programs like Windows Media Player. For the purposes of this review, I just used the Creative software and had no problem getting the Zen filled in a few minutes of time.

The Zen supports playlists which can be created easily within "Zen V Series Media Explorer" and then transferred to the player along with your music. Once the Zen has been synched, music files are organized by album, artist, genre, and of course your own playlists. Sound quality with the included headphones is good but not great, which is pretty much the standard story for the "freebies" that get thrown in with these types of devices nowadays.

In my testing the Zen was able to provide almost an hour and a half longer music playback than its 15 hour battery rating. Of course that was just continuous playback, with very little usage of the screen, so you can expect that time to drop if you're doing a lot of screen navigation, or watching videos.

One of the nice bonus features of the Zen is the built-in FM radio tuner which is something that not one iPod model can boast of. I found the reception and sound quality to be surprisingly good in most situations, although there were times when signal quality would degrade indoors when moving about my house. The ability to watch and listen to the TVs via short range radio broadcast while working out in the gym was definitely a nice bonus feature for a device in this price range.

Aside from the purely audio features, the Zen V Plus also includes support for picture and video files as well. I must say up front that, considering its size and price, I'm quite impressed that the Zen V Plus includes video support at all. With that said, it's also quite understandable, considering its size and prize, that video playback isn't exactly "stellar." Still pictures, which for me mostly consisted of album covers, aren't what I'd call "beautiful and detailed" either. With a screen resolution of only 128 x 128 though, there aren't that many pixels to work with, but it's nice to at least be able to get an idea of what album covers look like, or be able to customize the background of the device with one of your own pictures.

Video is pretty difficult to watch not only because of the small size, but the limited frame rate which caps out at 15 frames per second as well. Based on the size of the videos I transferred to the Zen, I figured the 2GB version could hold a little more than an hour worth of video, so the conversion process obviously isn't compressing the videos very well, if at all. This is probably because the Zen V Plus simply doesn't have enough processing power to play highly compressed video files. In my testing, the Creative software wouldn't convert any video files that were encoded with XVid or divX. The files I did get transferred to the Zen were all .WMV files, and worked fine after they'd been converted to the correct size and format by the Creative software.

The built-in microphone recorder is another feature I found to work fairly well. Recording my own voice in close proximity to the microphone proved to yield fairly good results, although I can't say that I noticed any active background noise reduction when listening to the playback. You definitely wouldn't want to record a song, or music with the microphone, but making quick verbal notes or reminders could be a fairly cool use for the mic. The line-in recorder was something that I couldn't test since I didn't have the correct cable for it. I can't think of many reasons why you'd want to record something from a CD player directly into a portable media player in the first place, but if that's your thing, then the Zen should do the trick.

There are a few smaller features that are worth mentioning as well, such as the ability to synch with Microsoft Outlook so you can look up your contacts directly from the Zen. There are also 8 different audio equalizer presets to choose from, and a customizable equalizer as well. The Zen also keeps track of the time and date, but skimps in the gaming department since there aren't any games included with it.

Based on the relatively short amount of time I was able to spend with the Zen V Plus, it seemed to be a fairly durable media player. After a few weeks of regular use the screen was still scratch-free which is a testament to the anti-scratch display it utilizes. We prefer not to destroy the products we test here at TheTechLounge so I didn't do any brutal durability tests, but the Zen was able to withstand a few falls here and there onto carpeted floors without any negative effects as well.

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Page 1: Introduction & First Impressions
Page 2: Testing
Page 3: Conclusion

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8 User Comments

1 - Posted by handrail on May 11, 2007 - 11:07 am

what did you think of the navigation joystick, mark? was is difficult to manipulate or toggle through menus or songs?

brad.

2 - Posted by Mark on May 14, 2007 - 8:47 am

The joystick isn't too bad. It was a bit annoying at times, but it's still functional, even for someone with larger hands like myself. As I stated in the review however, there are definitely better control mechanisms out there on similarly sized players. Take a look at the iRiver Clix for example. You just press down on all four edges of the screen, and those are your buttons. There's really no wasted space with that kind of a setup either, so your player is ALL screen which is obviously quite nice.

3 - Posted by aussiebear on May 16, 2007 - 7:29 am

I got the 1GB model. (Its the same thing, but the ring around the joystick is orange instead of green).

MORE Cons!

* Creative forces you to use WinXP if you aren't technically minded. The apps they provide on the CD does NOT work with Win2k. The reason is because they claim the requirements for PlaysForSure (MS's DRM) is WinXP.

* As part of PlaysForSure, these devices don't behave like the old or generic portable USB devices. You simply can't plug it into a PC and pass MP3s into it like a USB drive. You have to install drivers because of some proprietary protocol via USB. Damn you Microsoft!

To get things to work on Win2k, go here and scroll down to the 7th post from the top.
http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/mess...

For Linux, you need:
http://gnomad2.sourceforge.net/
(This is the only way to access this device).

* If you use Win2k or Linux, you are pretty much out of luck if you want to use it to watch videos. The Zen V Plus's apps converts a video into some weird format called DIB. From what I've read its just passing 15fps of JPEGs to make it look like its playing video. This little device is so underpowered its not funny.

(Then again, you wouldn't watch videos with something this small, its bad for your eyes!)

* Another sad thing about it, is that (for the 1GB model) you can only re-allocate 512MB for storage of regular data files. You can't use the whole thing!

Conclusion?

This is my last brand-name portable player. I've learnt nothing but to despise MS and their PlaysForSure DRM specification. (Its pretty much on all brand name portable players!)...YUCK!

4 - Posted by dave on May 22, 2007 - 7:49 pm

can some make a step my slow step video of how to use this ZEN V Plus 2GB i try all over the web SEE I'm Old got it for x-mas i seen a video on youtude.com for another kind of MP3 player i try goin" to Cnet.com/PC world.com and yes CREATIVE I E MAIL THEM they won't write back it's still in box hard for me to see book in box get lost with that CD thing I * HOPE someone out there care to help me one day we all get old and will need help with new stuff this no joke i still use my AIWA cass tape player so E-Mail me with a video web site for this ZEN V plus THANKS brb_brks@yahoo.com may 22,2007 8:21pm---->looks at the video's Ppl make on youtude.com and make one of this Creative Zen V Plus 2 GB black / green god bless ALL

5 - Posted by blackjet on May 23, 2007 - 3:53 pm

hehehehe "prefer not to destroy" = keep perhaps? eigh? ;-)

6 - Posted by Kurtis on May 24, 2007 - 10:48 am

nope, not keep. we bought it for review and then sold it on ebay. sometimes it's easier to do that than to get on a waiting list for sponsorship.

7 - Posted by blackjet on May 24, 2007 - 3:04 pm

awww man that's a drag I thought companies would love to get you guys to review stuff for them, great publicity!

8 - Posted by tbaarr on September 30, 2007 - 12:29 pm

How do I transfer my old record albums to my zen 5? The my recording section fills up after 20 songs. Those songs are deleted from my playlist if I delete them from the MY recordings area

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