5. How She Plays

Above and beyond everything else, the Vision:M wouldn't be worthwhile unless it was good at playing back audio and video files. Thankfully, in terms of quality, the Vision:M is one of the best offerings I've ever seen in its class.

Starting with the video, the extra colors onscreen seem to show, and the quality of the picture is top notch, beating the iPod by a slim but noticeable margin. Playback is crisp and I rarely found it to stutter, with most of the issues I experienced having more to do with the file itself rather than the player.

On Video Out the Vision:M comes into its own as a portable media player for your TV. Hook it up - presuming of course that the file is capable to standing up to the job - and your 320x240 picture will suddenly become a much bigger monster. The player doesn't scale down the image and so the quality is as good as it would be if you ran it from your computer to the TV.

In testing we found that the Vision:M should just about live up to Creative's boast of four hour battery life when playing videos (longer for TV connections since the screen is off.) We found while playing a mix of movies and music videos at a comfortable volume level of 14 (out of 24 levels), that the Vision:M's battery life was around 3.30hrs, though four hours is possible depending on usage.

Similar high-quality is shown through in the picture viewer, which can also be set to Video Out, which can provide some very nice slideshows indeed when you set one of your songs to play in the background. There is also a handy zoom-function on pictures.

Finally, for audio the Vision:M has a lot of its predecessor's hard engineering work to thank for some nice sound indeed. The player itself outputs very clear sound that picked up on a lot of the nuances of pieces we listened to, but as with all such things, the supplied headphones can be a let down.

In this case the headphones Creative supplied did an admirable job, though we did experience better sound quality when plugging in meatier headphones such as Creative's own HN-505's.

The equalizer presets and options, including bass boost, go a way to enhancing the sound, though not by a terribly large amount. We'll leave it to the next-generation of media players from Creative, which we're promised will have a scaled down version of the company's powerful X-Fi chip included, to get truly astounding sound enhancement.

In Conclusion

As far as digital video players go the Creative Zen Vision:M is at the top of the current pile beating its competition in terms of quality and battery life. It stands in good stead as an audio player and picture viewer as well, but obviously if you're shelling out the extra cash for a video player then that's what will matter to you the most.

Creative has had the problem in the past of producing technically superior products, which never-the-less got trounced by technically inferior players from Apple. This is their gambit to try and turn that trend around. The Vision:M is technologically the superior product to the iPod, but whether or not it will sell like hot potatoes and bring the Creative brand in out of the cold remains to be seen.