Creative Zen 32 GB Portable Media Player (Black)

May 04

Creative Zen 32 GB Portable Media Player (Black)

Binding: Electronics
ASIN: B0012YPMOC
Manufacturer: Creative Labs
Average Customer Review: (From 16 total reviews)
List Price: ~~$299.99~~
Amazon Price: Too low to display (26 new available)
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours (Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping)

Price is accurate as of the date/time indicated. Prices and product availability are subject to change. Any price displayed on the Amazon web site at the time of purchase will govern the sale of this product.

Features

Enjoy all of your media on a device that’s about the width of a credit card
Watch 120 hours of videos, enjoy up to 8,000 of your favorite songs, or share hundreds of photos with your friends
2.5-inch TFT color display with 320 x 240-pixel resolution and support for up to 16.7 million colors
Clock and alarm function, volume restriction, eight equalizer settings, and a USB hard drive mode
Weighs 2.1 ounces and measures 3.26 x 2.16 x .44 inches (W x H x D)

Accessories

Editorial Reviews

Product Description:
Creative Labs introduces the credit card-sized ZEN with a stunning 2.5″ color screen for music, video and photos - featuring an expansive 32GB in-built capacity, as well as an SD slot for even more memory. Students, travelers, and professionals seeking a superior, feature rich MP3 player to fit their active lifestyle, this is the MP3 player for you. Listen to your favorite FM stations and save up to 32 presets 2.5 High resolution color TFT display (320 x 240 pixels, 16.7 million color support for photos) Battery Life - Up to 25 hours of continuous audio playback, Up to 5 hours of continuous video playback Audio Playback Format - MP3, WMA, non-protected AAC, WAV and Audible 2,3 and 4 Photo Format - JPEG with transcoding - GIF, TIFF, PNG and BMP Video Playback Format - MJPEG, WMV9 with transcoding - MPEG1 and 2, MPEG4-SP, DivX 4 and 5 and XviD Syncs with and views Microsoft Outlook Contacts, Calendar & Tasks Functions as an external hard drive 8 EQ settings (Acoustic, classical, disco, jazz, new age, pop, rock and vocal) Capture notes on the go with the handy built-in microphone Supports iTunes Plus (unprotected AAC) and music and video subscription services System Requirements - Microsoft Windows XP (Service Pack 2), Microsoft Windows Vista, USB 1.1 port, and 130MB free space Dimensions - Width 3.26 x Height 2.16 x Depth 0.44 Weight - 2.1 ounces

Amazon.com Product Description:
This credit-card-sized Zen has a stunning 2.5-inch color screen and is perfect for music, videos, and photos. Enjoy up to 8,000 MP3, WMA, or AAC songs; watch up to 120 hours of videos; and share hundreds of photos with your friends. Even expand your portable music, video, or photo collection by adding additional content through the convenient SD memory slot. The Zen player also is available in 2 GB, 4 GB, 8 GB, and 16 GB capacities.

A razor sharp 2.5-inch display makes your photos and videos come to life. See the Zen in detail.

Small size, big features–all in the palm of your hand.

Add even more storage capacity via the SD card slot.

Credit Card-sized Player Supports 16.7 Million Colors
View your album art, videos, and photos on this 2.5-inch razor-sharp TFT display. Your favorite photos will burst to life in 16.7 million colors on the fresh new Zen patented user interface. The TFT display works under sunlight and allows everyone to watch your home videos and vacation slideshows from any angle.

Truly a Multimedia Player
Zen is the first Creative player to support the unprotected AAC format, so you can enjoy all your favorite CD tracks that you’ve ripped through iTunes software. Zen also supports iTunes Plus tracks from the iTunes store, in addition to MP3 and WMA music tracks. It is also compatible with music subscription services, such as Napster To Go and Rhapsody.

Zen also supports audio books from Audible.com. Download your favorite books to keep everyone entertained on long road trips or download daily news reports every morning and listen to the news during your morning commute.

Watch purchased or rented movies and TV shows from online services like Amazon Unbox. Share home videos. Or load your Tivo To Go recorded movies and TV shows.

Plus, share your collections of latest photos in 16.7 million colors. Instantly turn your slideshows into attention-grabbing multimedia extravaganzas by adding your favorite song to the slideshow.

Expandable Memory
Need more space? Add additional storage capacity with the built-in SD slot and easily play new music, videos or photos on your player. With SD cards to go, carry virtually unlimited amounts of your digital library, anywhere you go.

FM Radio
In between your tunes, use the built-in FM radio to keep yourself up to date with world events, sports scores, or traffic reports. Or tune in to the program airing on the gym’s TV while running on the treadmill.

Battery Life
Enjoy up to 30 hours of your songs or 5 hours of video on a single charge–over a full day of music. Or 10 episodes of Scrubs!

What’s in the Box
Zen player, earphones, USB 2.0 cable, installation CD, quick start guide.


*A slick user interface makes it a snap to enjoy your media.*

Customer Reviews

do the buttons have backlights by J. Contreras
I like the product but im not sure if the four buttons are backlit. I wrote to creative and it seems like they dont know.

Deeply Flawed Software by P. Hack
If you’re like me and have thousands of mp3’s that are not classified by album, then don’t go near this player with a ten foot pole. The reason I say this is that when you attempt to browse songs by a particular artist or band, you can only view the songs by album - any song that does not have it’s album tag filled in won’t show up under that artist. Basically, if any track has no album info, it becomes invisible. Older Zen mp3 players had a “List all Tracks by Artist” option when you browsed a particular artist or band - selecting this option would show all the tracks by that artist in alphabetical order regardless of whether the album info was filled in for a track or not. The new Zen players do not have this option. I went to one artist on my player that I had 60 songs for, except none of the tracks had album info, and when I selected that artist the player told me their were no tracks by that artist on the player - totally and completely ridiculous.

Worse yet, all those tracks that have no album associated with them will not play in shuffle mode. I loaded the player with 1000 songs that had no album info and 10 songs that did have their album info, and put the player into shuffle mode. Shuffle mode then told me their were only 10 songs on the player, and proceeded to play those 10 songs (the ones with album info) over and over, while completely ignoring the other 1000 songs (the ones without album info). This has to be about the dumbest thing I’ve seen in any consumer product in years. I’ve seen complaints about how lame the shuffle play feature is on these players and how they seem to play the same songs over and over in shuffle mode - well this is the reason why. A large percentage of these users tracks are not even being recognized in shuffle mode.

If you keep all your mp3’s tagged by album then you will be fine. If not, then don’t go near this player.

More than expected by Born Free
This is my first mp3 player and when I first heard about the 32GB Zen I knew my wait was over. I needed a player that would hold my whole CD collection without compromese and was thinking about one of the hard drive versions from Creative(I won’t buy Apple products as they are too proprietary. I was sold on the small size and the SSID memory (no moving parts!). When I got it home I had to learn how to load my albums aboard and that was rather time-consuming (I mean the loading not the learning. This technology is amazing; I keep looking that stack of 636 albums and the credit card sized Zen that they fit on and am amazed. I bought some noise isolating earbuds and put my target shooting earmuffs on and I am transported. In the future I’ll buy a SD card to put photos and videos and podcasts on. The FM radio gets excellent reception and the voice recorder will come in handy I expect. I recommend this product whole-heartedly

Absolutely stunning gadget!! by A Kat Person
I’ve owned this wonderful little player for about a month now, and I am totally enamored with it. The direct competitor to this player is the new ipod nano, and honestly, I can’t imagine why anyone would go for that player over this one. I see that at the moment, an 8 GB nano costs $189, whereas with the Zen you get 32 GB for $285! Hello?? Do the math?? Plus, as always, a Creative player has much better sound quality (they are a manufacturer of sound cards, after all…) and a crisp, brilliant screen that is larger in size (Zen’s 2.5″ to new ipod’s 2″). Music videos look nice on it, and, my Zen also doubles as a portable art portfolio; I can show people my artwork and photography on it and it looks great. Also, as compared with ipods, it is incredibly sturdy. I already dropped it a couple of times (yeah, clumsy…)and it’s perfectly fine! Whereas I have friends who have irreparably damaged their ipods by dropping them once. It’s a perfect size, slips comfortably into any pocket, and has a nice, sturdy feel to it. Compared with older Creative models, it’s also VERY pretty! Pretty-ness is the sole advantage ipods really had going for them before, but this new Zen is definitely on-par in terms of looks.

Also, the fellow who complained that this player is expensive compared with the larger hard-drive based Creative players - well, he’s wrong to discount the importance of this being a flash player. The fact that this is a quite large capacity flash player IS a big deal. Main advantages of flash over hard drive: sturdier, much longer battery life, less prone to crash, less prone to damage if dropped, runs and loads faster. No moving parts, so it’s overall more reliable and less prone to breakage. It’s just a much superior technology overall.

To those who complain about the earphones that come with it: no matter what player you use, if you care about sound quality, then you don’t use the earphones that come with the player!! I think Creative is good to simply include some spares and NOT charge you for what they think are good ‘phones. Why? Because it should be up to the individual what kind of headphones they prefer. I’ve been using my Zen with Bang & Olufsen Form 2 headphones, and this combination sounds fantastic. Also, I rip my CD’s to ~192 VBR; I don’t hear too much difference in sound between 192 and 320, but I DO hear LOTS of difference between 128 and 192, so for me this seems to be the ideal happy medium between file size and sound quality. I would encourage everyone else to experiment and find their ideal bit rate, because Creative sound quality and good headphones won’t help you if you rip to 128 bps!

A quick rundown of some pro’s and con’s in general:

1. As mentioned - great sound and beautiful clear screen. I don’t find that I really need a case (I usually keep it in my pocket so there’s nothing in there to scratch it), however, a screen protector is a MUST! I bought one with the player and put it on before doing anything else.

2. It’s damn cute. Just looking at it makes me smile.
3. The software is fine, and I also like being able to simply transfer files just using folders.

4. The SD card slot is a GREAT idea. It would be nice if they integrate it better in the future, but even un-integrated it’s very handy. I keep my videos on it and my music and pics on the player.

5. Really not expensive at all for a 32GB flash player!

6. Sturdy!!! I have dropped it without crying afterwards…
7. It seems to be very stable. So far I have had to reset it twice while it was docked, but this was due to my own error - both times I had tried to delete an album off the player that was set as “now playing” - so I think I confused it! But as long as I don’t do anything silly like that, I haven’t had to reset it.

8. Very long battery life. I’ve spent practically all day walking around listening to the Zen, and still have half a charge left at the end of the day. My ears get tired before it does!

9. This may not be important for all users, but is very important for me: displays foreign characters correctly. I have music on here that uses Scandinavian languages (with some funny characters) and also some music in Russian - I have had problems with other players displaying Cyrillic letters incorrectly, but not this one.

Not many con’s, just a couple:

1. The cable is indeed short, but it doesn’t seem problematic to me. The player is light enough to just hang off the usb port on the short cable with no problems.

2. The one major con for me - that it doesn’t have a usb host function as its hard-drive based cousin seems to have. That would have been a nice feature, I hope they integrate it into the next model!

3. Indeed the screen is very hard to see in direct sunlight. But, this is another one of those not-very-important cons that I have learned to work around. If I am in direct sunlight I simply work the player while shading it with my hand or jacket, or I step into the shade. Mild annoyance, but really not that big a deal.

Anyway, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, obviously. I can’t think of any other player on the market right now that even comes close to the quality of this one. And no, for all you cynics out there, I don’t work for Creative, I’m just in love with my new toy

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