Creative Zen Sleek Photo

...for my birthday, a 5GB Creative Zen which was about all I could afford at the time. Over time it started to annoy me as I had to select some of my CD's to be banished to obscurity (ie not be put onto the player). Now I love a variety of music and after a year this was really starting to annoy me so I had my eye out for a replacement, larger capacity player. Over a few weeks I narrowed my choice down to another Creative or an I-River. As I had already ...
...end I plumped for the Creative and set out to find myself the best deal and player possible.

The Creative player I ended up buying is the Creative Zen Sleek Photo 20GB and is available through pixmania.com (on Amazon) for around £140 at the time of writing. Luckily for me the player was on sale at Argos and mentioned in a TV advert for only £109.99. Suffice to say the next day I toddled of to my local Argos and picked it up.
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Last year I bought an MP3 player for my birthday, a 5GB Creative Zen which was about all I could afford at the time. Over time it started to annoy me as I had to select some of my CD's to be banished to obscurity (ie not be put onto the player). Now I love a variety of music and after a year this was really starting to annoy me so I had my eye out for a replacement, larger capacity player. Over a few weeks I narrowed my choice down to another Creative or an I-River. As I had already owned a Creative I wanted to stick to that make although the 2 players had similar reviews, capacity and capabilities. In the end I plumped for the Creative and set out to find myself the best deal and player possible.

The Creative player I ended up buying is the Creative Zen Sleek Photo 20GB and is available through pixmania.com (on Amazon) for around £140 at the time of writing. Luckily for me the player was on sale at Argos and mentioned in a TV advert for only £109.99. Suffice to say the next day I toddled of to my local Argos and picked it up.

Opening the box was a bit of a challenge. Is it just me or are some boxes designed to be tricky to get into, or to get stuff out of. It seems to be a recurring problem for me and I'm starting to doubt my all round capability in box matters. Once in the box you will find a manual, CD, charger, USB cable and headphones. You also get a pouch for keeping the player in whilst you're on the go. This was a bit of a disappointment for me, the pouch was very cheaply made and although it does do the job it was designed for I would have expected something a bit higher quality from Creative.

If you are running a computer with Windows Media Player 9 or above I wouldn't bother installing the Creative software as the player is fully functional with WMP and most of us have already got music stored on WMP anyway so it would actually create more work if you were to use Creative's media player. The player handily supports the 2 main formats of music, WMA and MP3 so there is no need to convert songs into special formats as with other players.

Once you have uploaded, downloaded and ripped all the music you want to put onto the player you can then transfer it to the player. This is a quick process and even I (the most impatient person in the world) didn't get annoyed at the time it was taking. There are a couple of ways in which to put music onto the device. The first is to synchronize the player through WMP selecting the tracks you want. The other is to simply drag the albums from 'My Music' to the player which will show up once plugged in under 'My Computer'. Either option is easy although I did find the drag and drop method more convenient as I could transfer albums with one action.

Once you have all the songs stored on your player it is fairly easy to navigate around. The main screen has a menu that contains all the options you would really need. From the main menu you are able to look at you Music Library, Random Play All, search by Artist or Album, even Genre although I find that the automatic labelling function of Genre leaves something to be desired, both in Windows Media Player and Creative's own media software. Importantly you can alter what appears on your front screen in the settings option which is easily accessed from the default front screen.

Anyway, now you know about the player I'll give you some personal opinion of it! I find the Zen Sleek a lot easier to use than the Zen Micro. The buttons are 'positive buttons' in that they actually press down and aren't on a touch pad. The scroll bar is still a touch pad but I have never found a problem with it, you can turn down the sensitivity of the touch pad scroller if you need. The player is fairly quick to respond after you have pressed a button and you don't need to wait an age for it to start up or do what you have asked it to.

It looks much better than the ipod in my opinion and the brushed aluminium exterior looks kind of nice and adds to the whole sleekness of the player. The rest of the player is unfortunately white but you can't complain too much, as a package I don't think you would be embarrassed to pull this out of your pocket and show it to your mates, not that you'd want to in case some hoodlum nicked it. The screen is big enough to see easily and as it has a colour screen it is more colourful than other players have been. The buttons are backlit with the ubiquitous Creative blue light after you've pressed them and the screen stays lit for about 4 seconds after a button has been pressed although this also is alterable. This is perfectly adequate to see what is being played next. The menu screen is visible for a longer amount of time which is good too.

The sound of this MP3 is really good. I have listened to it in my car (via FM transmitter), through headphones and via a stereo. All of these options result in a better, richer sound than my previous MP3 which I didn't think was that bad to start with. The supplied headphones are sufficient although those of you who like to be different will undoubtedly buy alternative ones.

The viewing screen is perfectly acceptable and as it is a colour screen you are able to display your photos on it. Uploading these to the player is really easy, as you just drag and drop them across onto the player from your PC. Having looked at some of the photos on the player they are not super detailed but what would you expect form something that has a screen only 1.7 inches across! As the screen is colour you can customise the theme that you have, being a girl I currently have mine set to 'romantic' which seems to be mainly pink.

The player also contains an FM radio which picks up all the major stations. You are able to record from the radio also, as well as using the player as a voice recorder. Handy if you like that sort of thing but I use mine for music and photos in the main. If you need to transport files from your PC around you are able to do this with the player by portioning off part of the hard drive as portable storage, this again is not a feature I use and I wouldn't recommend buying the player for this feature alone as there must be cheaper things to buy that are built for that purpose. It is a useful capability to have however, just in case.

I know I have been all positive about this player but there are things that really bug me about it. They aren't big enough to make me regret my purchase, but sufficient to lodge themselves in the back of my brain and stay there. Firstly the player seems to need resetting every so often. Whether I had this problem because the player was in a very hot car all day I don't know but I wouldn't recommend heating your player excessively. If you do have a problem where the player freezes, Creative have built in a reset button into the player that you can push with a pin or such like, after you have reset the player all of your tracks will still be there, a minor inconvenience rather than a major annoyance.

My second gripe is that the player does not have a removable battery as the Zen Micro does. This was really reassuring as I knew that if my Micro battery failed I could just buy a new one but this is not the case with the Sleek Photo, a shame I think although I haven't had any problems with the battery life at all, in fact, the battery has been nothing less than amazing, easily covering a couple of days driving (really long days too!).

My final annoyance is that the player doesn't have a USB port on it. You have to connect via a special cable that is similar to the one on the ipod. In my opinion having a USB would have been much more user friendly. If you lose this cable you have to replace it whereas previously you could just use the one from your camera for example to do the same job.

Should you have any problems with your MP3 I wholly recommend the Creative technical support who replaced my Zen Micro after about 10 months when I broke it (I think) or it malfunctioned. A new unit winged its way to me with 4 days, no questions asked, a truly excellent service.

So there you go, the Creative Zen Sleek Photo - do I recommend it? Why yes I do, with 4 out of 5 stars. It would have been 5 stars but I just can't shake the cable problem out of my mind. It just makes my cables look messy if I have them all attached to the PC!

 

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