Creative's 4GB, 16GB Zen players see price drops

Shortly after hitting Amazon (and getting really official), Creative has seemingly dropped the price of its 4GB and 16GB Zens -- in America, at least. Of course, you can make of all this what you will, but the facts are that the 4GB iteration has sunk from $149 to $129.99 on both Amazon and the firm's own webstore, while the 16GB version has dropped from $299 to $249.99. Interestingly, the 8GB version remains stuck (at least momentarily) at $199.99. So, if you've been eying a Zen for yourself but couldn't quite cough up the required dough, here's your chance to save some green.

[Thanks, John A.]
Read - Amazon's Zen listings
Read - Creative's webstore

[zoggy Posted Sep 24th 2007 11:22PM]

Went to go browse Creative's forums about the Zen to see if they have any word of what is supported.

I stumbled onto this for the zen when submitting a support request about supported media formats/codecs:

Audio files:

MP3 (Up to 320 kbps)
WMA (Up to 320 kbps)
WMA with PlaysForSure™ Digital Rights Management (DRM) 10 (applicable to files played from the player's memory only)
WAV (PCM and IMA ADPCM)
Audible
AAC (non-protected .M4A)

Pictures

JPEG (Baseline: Up to 16.6 MegaPixels)

Video Files

MJPEG
WMV9
MPEG4
XviD
DivX 4.x and DivX 5.x(*note)

Note: XviD encoded files are playable if they are encoded as standard MPEG-4 Simple (SP) or Advanced Simple Profile (ASP) without GMC and QPEL support. This product is not certified by DivX Inc. and may not play all DivX 4 and DivX 5 files. Other formats, for example MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, may be transcoded with the bundled software. Appropriate codecs must be preinstalled.)

[zoggy Posted Sep 25th 2007 2:15AM]

okay one more update..

Dont use creative's video encoder for your tv rips.. it just takes too long and you run into sync issues.

I tried a few apps tonight to downsample tv rips and the best/simpliest one so far has been to use PocketDivx encoder. Use the latest beta 0.3.96 for dual core support - takes like 3-4 mins for half an hour show, 6mins for a 1hr show, 12mins for a movie..


Run PocketDivx ( http://www.pocketdivxencoder.net/exes92/PocketDivXEncoder_0.3.96.exe )
- load the tv xvid rip
- change video quality to 100 (i like to keep the video quality the same as i d/led)
- click on 'Change' to modify the output dimensions.
- Move the left slider (controls width) to 320. Most likely this is going to make the video 320x182 (which is going to produce a letter box effect)
- click 'Encode Now' and thats it..

obviously if its a funny resolution make sure it fits within the QVGA standards of 320x240, and if you use 'advanced options' there is a few more settings to squeeze out some more quality but you will be waiting 2x as long to convert.

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 25th 2007 1:21AM]

I've been telling my friend-with-an-ipod about Creative for years, but he won't listen.

[Neebs Posted Sep 25th 2007 6:30AM]

Awesome, I had planned to buy one for Christmas.

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 28th 2007 5:11PM]

Can the battery be removed?

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 28th 2007 11:59PM]

This is getting tiring. The ONLY way any other company is going to break up iPod's stronghold is to AIR SOME TV ADS! I don't care if it's good or bad, just spend a little more on Marketing! It's never a waste. Sure, the mainstream consumers are all latching on to the iPod, with the techy geeks hanging on to ZENs and Sansas (and the ocassional tatooed fatty with a Zune, AND kiddies with Disneys and Nicks), but nobody's not gonna know about no players if you guys don't spread the word!

(Yes, I know the Zune had a brief TV spot, but with all the biased media attention from CNN and others...)

[zoggy Posted Sep 29th 2007 11:35AM]

Hey, just to follow up after having the device for a week I figured i'd hit some more highlights and answer some questions.

@edward - no you can not, it is internal.

To just let you guys know, if you have vista you can simply just plug in the zen and access it like xp users do once they install the software via windows explorer.

Now to touch more onto the whole playing xvid movies, well the only thing i've noticed is when I convert files the bitrate changes and causes audio to become out of sync (usually only a few ms). I've tried to do different bitrates but haven't found out exactly how to get them to shrink smaller and have the audio be 100% exact... I think i'm going to have to do some random conversions with all different test to see what the heck is going on since they play fine on the pc but are slightly out of sync on the zen.

There is no .m3u or .cue file support, but you can put the files on the device... but realize because of this when you delete the folder FROM the device it only deletes the mp3's and the folder really does stay because of these files it doesn't know about.

Also, the response time is slow when deleting files... hopefully something they will fix in a new firmware (I think it runs it's 'updating libary' routine on every action.. thus deleting a 15 file folder takes like 24 secs... way too long in my book.

One nice little thing I notice is that if you play a video and exit out, the next time you go back in it will resume from where you left off. This is a great feature that makes those that wanna watch something in-between something else very simple and nice.

The device gets awesome battery time, looks great and has worked well. With all the negative comments I can still honestly stay this has been a great purchase. I do look for more mature firmware and software as i'm sure anyone would.

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 30th 2007 1:15PM]

zoggy I have one more question to you.
What do you think about sound quality of this player? And bass and pitch elements are strong enough? Is the sound compact?
Thanks a lot for your responses

[zoggy Posted Sep 30th 2007 11:49PM]

The sound quality is only going to be as good as the headphones/speakers you use. I have these nice sony over the ear headphones i bought awhile ago for like 45$. I love the audio quality from the zen, but of course I only encode at decent settings and only play audio at 192kbit.

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 2nd 2007 9:50AM]

Thank you for your answer.
And i have sometning more to you. What about battery life and resistance of screen against scratches? I mean, is it easy to scratch it or not? And when you buy it, is there any protective clingfilm on the screen? And i have read in one review that the buttons are not very sensitive, so you have to push them hard to take action which you want to take. Is it true?
And again thanks for your response

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 9th 2007 10:09AM]

Zoggy i have sometning more to you. What about battery life and resistance of screen against scratches? I mean, is it easy to scratch it or not? And when you buy it, is there any protective clingfilm on the screen? And i have read in one review that the buttons are not very sensitive, so you have to push them hard to take action which you want to take. Is it true?
And again thanks for your response