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Creative ZEN 8GB MP3 Player | 
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| Brand: Creative
Category: CE
List Price: £89.99
Buy New: £64.79
You Save: £25.20 (28%)
New (15) Used (2) Refurbished (2) from £49.99
Rating:  91 reviews
Media: Electronics
Fragile: No
Batteries Included: No
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.1
Dimensions (in): 0.4 x 0.4 x 0.4
MPN: 70PF216000115
Model: 70PF216000115
EAN: 5390660143908
ASIN: B000V9IAYS
Release Date: September 19, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | 8GB flash memory capacity | | • | 2.5in screen size | | • | Supports audio: MP3, WMA, WAV, AAC and Audible | | • | Supports video: WMV, DivX and Xvid | | • | FM Tuner |
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| Accessories:
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Technical DataAudio Input / TypeMicrophoneTechnical DataDimensions & Weight / Widthcm8.3Technical DataDimensions & Weight / Depthcm1.2Technical DataDimensions & Weight / Heightcm5.5Technical DataDimensions & Weight / Weightg65Technical DataMiscellaneous / ColourBlackTechnical DataFlash Memory / Installed SizeGB8Technical DataHeader / Product LineCreative ZENTechnical DataHeader / CompatibilityPCTechnical DataHeader / ManufacturerCreative TechnologyTechnical DataHeader / Packaged Quantity1Technical DataRemote Control / TypeNoneTechnical DataRadio System / Tuner TypeFMTechnical DataRadio System / Preset Station Qty32Technical DataAudio System / TypeDigital player / radioTechnical DataAudio System / Sound Output ModeStereoTechnical DataEqualiser / Equalizer5-bandTechnical DataRadio System / Tuner TypeDigital radio tunerTechnical DataDigital Player (Recorder) / Supported Digital Audio StandardsWMATechnical DataDigital Storage Media / TypeNoneTechnical DataEqualiser / EqualiserYesTechnical DataAudio System / Digital Player TypeFlash basedTechnical DataDigital Storage / CapacityGB8Technical DataAudio System / Digital Photo PlaybackYesTechnical DataAudio System / Functions (KB)RadioTechnical DataAudio System / Subcategory (KB)MP3 players (flash, CD, HDD)Technical DataAudio System / Digital Player FunctionsVoice recorderTechnical DataAudio System / Digital Video PlaybackYes
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| Customer Reviews:
 **** Use it sensibly for a satisfying experience. Here's how **** June 29, 2008
Brilliance
151 out of 155 found this review helpful
Right. Now for a more "user" perspective review. A review for people who will actually want to use this product the way it is meant to be. There are far too many negative reviews and some over-the-top positive reviews that really make buying this product more like buying a car on a wing and a prayer, hoping that it lasts out the depreciation. This turns out to be a lengthy review since I have spent some time using and abusing this player to establish the best way to use it resulting in a rewarding / satisfying experience. So dig in.
***** The Likes:
1. Small (not tiny) music player with photo and radio capability. No, seriously you don't want to watch feature length films on this, the odd YouTube flick maybe. The reason for this follows later.
2. Easy navigation buttons (rocker style) and are not flimsy as has been grandly claimed in other reviews here. Mostly if you stick to playing properly constructed playlists and the albums, you would not have to fiddle around with the buttons as much.
3. Crisp, clear sound but don't expect Dolby surround sound effects unless you have actually encoded the music using Dolby or THX or similar software. The EQ feature will help you tune the music to you taste. Good cans like the ones from Sennheiser or Grado will make a big difference to the listening experience. I am not trying to do a product promo here, but making the point that good headphones do make a significant difference to the listening experience.
4. SDHC support. Upto 16GB of external memory ought to be about the limit to which this player can take. Anymore and the firmware will start to strain. So with 16GB of additional storage over this player's inbuilt 8 GB and I have more than enough of all the music I need to hear on the go.
Besides there is not need to carry each and every one of my MP3's just because I can. We don't carry all out CD's with our CD player when on a holiday so why carry the excess baggage?
***** The Dislikes:
1. Radio can be used only with bundled headphones which act as an antenna (at least on my piece, I couldn't get reception with my personal cans plugged in). This is a shame because the bundled phones are not great sounding.
2. Memory card data cannot be logically structured the way it is stored on the player. So it's rather less intuitive.
3. Finger smudge magnet. Well this is solved with a screen protector. I won't recommend the extra accessories like the leather case or the clear case as this will double the size of the player, quite the opposite of the reason why I bought the Zen in the first place (small size). Just hold it nicely and wipe it regularly using a lint free cloth.
***** Myths vs. Reality *****
1. WSOD - Well documented problem of white screen of death. Fortunately I haven't faced it and most people won't either. The Zen's sold these days are preloaded with the latest firmware and together with the mass production of so many millions of players; Creative is also getting the hardware in top shape.
In case you do face the problem, the solution is to reinstall the firmware and use the Zen recovery tool from Creative's website. (All this is explained nicely in the FAQ's on the website). This does work well as I have used it before on the Zen MUVO. So this problem is being magnified by the negative reviewers many times over. The solution is there and it is pretty straight forward.
2. The Big Freeze - Again well documented. The player freezes intermittently and has to be reset. Now here's to all the people out there. I am a software designer and created many a multi-tasking software so here's some advice. Don't overload the player. It's best to leave it at about 90-92% capacity at the most. Softwares are but arrangements of 1's and 0's so if you stuff the player, it's going to seize. Much like your operating system. After a point overloading it to the brim of bursting is seriously going to compromise performance. This relates back to the first point I made about the videos. You seriously don't won't to watch movies on this piece. If you really want all that jungle juice go for a more expensive PMP like the Cowon A3 or the Archos 605. Don't simply buy this player, stuff it and then moan that it does not perform. Obviously it won't.
3. Albums/tracks appear in random order - No they don't if you take the pains of tagging the MP3's properly. If your tags are sloppy, the player is just going to tell you that you are sloppy.
4. No mains charger - Don't need one. The mini USB does the trick. Again, remember this is a portable media player to listen to music when out and about and not your mega bucks hi-fi system. I hope after you are out and about you will return to civilization. Just plug it in to the USB on your PC/Mac and recharge.
5. Reset button is way too small - Of course it's got to be small or you'll accidentally keep pressing and resetting the player and then complaining that its way too large.
6. Bundled software is too slow - You don't have to use the bundled software. Connect the player using USB and it will appear as a media storage device on your PC/Mac. Just copy and paste the music. I don't recommend drag-n-drop as this leaves behind cached information on your machine which is not much fun to have (techies will relate to this).
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So the bottom line is, use this player sensibly and in the manner in which it was meant to be used and you will be amply rewarded. Overloading will lead to trouble. Most problems can also be fixed with updating the firmware (latest is 1.21.01) and using the recovery tool.
Create proper playlists and tag the music correctly for ease of playback.
Hope this review clears some negative air over this otherwise genuinely good piece of kit. I am giving it 4.5 stars as it could be better and because no player out there is perfect enough to merit a 5 star.
I was reviewing the 8 GB version and later used my friend's 16GB version in put it thru its paces and got similar results. So this applies to all versions and maybe to all similar MP3 players in the market.
 Stunning Little MP3 Player October 4, 2007
Mr. Ceiron Galbraith (england)
52 out of 55 found this review helpful
I have been in the market for an easy to use, small and stylish mp3 player for a while.
Ipods and sony's own players come with awful bloatware and are very limiting.
The only real alternative was creative and as soon as they brought out the Zen i knew i had found a winner.
The firstt thing that strieks you si the size, its tiny, yet still big enough to be usable.
The screen is clear and bright and battery life is excellent.
It doesnt try to copy the ipod control system but uses its own tailored to a very nice menu system that is fully customisable.
It comes with its own software but will sync with most music players or you can just drag and drop onto the player.
The sd hc slot adds the possibility of up to 64gb extra storage.
The player starts in under 5s and is very smooth, video playback is crisp and clear and viewable.
Music playback is superb and plenty loud enough.
It has a lto of extras liek a calender, contact list, alarm.
I could go on and on but all you need to know is this player lives up to the specs every bit and is well worth the rrp.
A product better then an ipod any day.
Little gem December 1, 2007
T. J. Byford (Birmingham, UK)
37 out of 38 found this review helpful
Aesthetically, the Zen is extremely attractive in its glossy piano black finish. The screen is an absolute joy, by far the best I have seen on such a small player. Because the screen is relatively small, 2.5", it needs to be good. There are so few controls that belie what is on hand, but the menu structure is not difficult to master.
I was so keen to get it up and running that I didn't even delve into the menu to start with. What a mistake! I loaded some classical works, very easy to do using Windows Media Player, plugged in the supplied headphones and....disappointment. I was greeted with a so-so sound, nothing like I was expecting from other reviews and a hi-fi mag that said the sound was stunning. I even plugged in my Sennheiser PX100 headset, but even these couldn't pull up the sound rating. Something was clearly not right. As it was by now late in the evening, I went to bed and came back to assess the unit properly the following evening.
Delving into the menu I found the audio settings. As delivered, the EQ was set to flat, and that is how the music sounded. However, once having set the sliders to my preferred settings, or even using the "classical" EQ setting, the sound was transformed. Somewhat of a surprise, this showed just how good the supplied Creative earphones are when compared to the Sennheisers. I can't measure it, but the Zen bass frequency does not appear to go as deep as some of my other players, so in the Zen the Sennheisers have no real advantage over the Zen phones. In organ works, or with large scale symphonic works, the Zen just misses out on the last degree of bass response that would otherwise underpin the work.
The radio is definitely an added bonus, it works rather well, picking up Radio 3 and Classic fm with no problem. Contrary to other reviews, I found there to be more than sufficient volume available from the Zen.
The ability to expand the music library by using SD cards is a boon. This enables me to maintain my main music library in the body of the unit, and copy over fresh material as and when I fancy to the card. Two features I particulary like: one is the ability to search using an alphabetical list, and the other is the playing track contiues to play while I search for another and until the new track starts. No silence whilst I browse the library!
As for the star rating, I would give the unit itself 5 stars, it really is a little gem, but the overall rating is 4 stars, as I still have some slight reservations about the overall sound capability for classical music. So, perhaps a 4.5 rating would be my final choice.
Fantastic little unit October 5, 2007
F. Pearce (London)
31 out of 34 found this review helpful
My ancient, original 'Zen Touch' was never quite the same since we were both run over by a van 3 years ago - the fact the player was actually crushed by a rear wheel & still worked (unlike my arm) is testament to Creative's build-quality. However, the buttons started acting up, and ever since I've been looking for a replacement. Surprisingly tricky.
I am very fussy about sound-quality - I use an MP3 player to listen to music, not as a fashion statement - which means the ubiquitous iPods & there laughable sound (& build) quality were out, along with a fair few more imaginative choices. Creative has been producing some odd-balls for some time which didn't suit me, but this unit does virtually everything (and rather more) that I think is important in an MP3 player: good battery life, excellent sound quality, and I'd assume good build going on past experience & it certainly feels as solid as something as small & light as this can be.
The FM tuner has excellent reception in my experience along with the same quality sound as the MP3 bit, although a nice extra feature would've been picking up station names too.
I can't comment on the quality of the headphones as I haven't even tried them (I use Shure 'E5c's - amazing little things if you don't mind the cost!).
The screen is very clear and it displays the (now-deleted!) photos that come with it very well; I assume that as the sound & picture is top-notch, the video play-back thingy should be so too, although I haven't tried it... I think there's software to convert video files into whatever it is that it uses, which looked fairly standard anyway? I just dump MP3 file directly to it as if it were hard-drive so I don't know much about the software side of things...
In summary, definitely an excellent little player if what you want from an MP3 player is to play your MP3s in top-quality sound without running out of batteries, and it seems pretty good at the other non-MP3-playing things you might want your MP3 player to do. More memory would have been nice, but then I should've waited for the 16GB, and I suppose the storage is effectively infinitely expandable through SD & SDHC cards...
 Misleading advertisement October 18, 2007
Sebastian Schneider (Bristol, UK)
31 out of 34 found this review helpful
"Marvelous" I thought, after reading the marketing text and some reviews here and elsewhere and bought the Zen for it's small size and the SD-Expansion-Slot, allowing me to plug in my 8GB SDHC Card, and soon to be affordable 16 and even 32GB SDHC of additional storage.
But, although the advertisement suggests that the SD-Slot acts as an expansion to the internal memory, this is not the case! It is merely "some other" memory, accessible via a separate "Memory Card" entry in the main menu. It allows you to browse the contents of the SD-Card, and if you happen to find a music or video file in a folder, you can play it, and after that the rest of the folder will be played as well. But the contents of the SD-Card are not indexed, and thus not accessible browsing through artist or genre lists. Let alone being in one and the same library with the songs on the internal memory! The songs on the internal memory are indeed indexed and sorted by artist, genre and album. Playlists can be created and played as well here. Album art is displayed if available, too. But for these files, this is the only option to select them; no folder-browsing here!
So, in short, internal memory and SD-Card memory are not integrated at all, but two very separate things in this device. The SD-Card Slot is rather for popping in a card every now and then with some songs, that are not yet on the internal memory, or some big video files you'd want to watch. (That said, I have not yet tried to watch a video off the SD-Card, I simply assume it is possible, but then again, you never know!)
Long story short, do only buy the player, if you do not really care about the SD-Slot. You'll have a really nice device you can even put an SD-Card in and listen to some songs off it, too. But if you want to put a huge SD-Card in and hope to join it with the internal memory to have a big music library - not with the Creative Zen! Buy something else.
Go to the forums on the Creative Website for a 12-page discussion lamenting this issue (at the moment of writing this). It boils down to there being little hope Creative might actually fix this issue. The reactions of the Creative staff on the forum have been rather "It's not a bug, it's a feature"-ish
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