I was looking for a digital picture frame to quickly view my pictures when out photographing and came across the creative ZEN. Small, rechargeable battery-powered, 16 million color display and SD card slot. And it is an MP3 and video player as well. Since I also use an iPod for all my music and video, I thought I’d compare them head-to-head after a month of usage.
- Price: A 2 gigabyte ZEN costs €60, an 8 gigabyte model €100. The iPod with 8 gigabyte costs €140.
- Capacity: The ZEN is limited to 16 gigabytes, iPods are available with 120 gigabytes. The ZEN can be expanded with SD cards, but they don’t integrate well with the system as they only show the file system instead of the playlists. It’s ok for movie storage and images, but that’s about it.
- Music Library (iTunes vs windows media player) This is a no-brainer, iTunes outperforms the windows media player and seamlessly integrates with the iPod. The ZEN is horrible to keep synchronized with your music library. It is supposed to be compatible with iTunes music, but it tries to import everything at once, which never fits. The ZEN is the kind of player for people who like manually copying files and directories.
- Stability: I’ve only had my iPod crash once and even then a soft-reset was sufficient. My ZEN crashes without fail every week. it’s a horribly unstable platform and I’m going to wear out the reset button (of the insert paperclip type) long before my play button will wear out. I’ve bought a lot of stuff from Creative over the years (headphones, webcam, soundcard,…), but after this crappy experience I’m not buying anything from them again. I’ve had days with 20 paperclip resets and two reformats with firmware reinstallation in one day. It is completely useless to take on the road with you.
- Screen: The ZEN has a nice screen and better colors than iPod. It’s also a bit larger.
- GUI: The ZENGUI is pretty good and you can choose custom colors and backgrounds. It is not so convenient due to the lack of search function (which iPod has) and it definitely lacks a scroll wheel for fast navigation.
- Protection: The ZEN offers a nice feature called password protection which allows you to protect private images. The iPod offers no such feature as far as I know.
- Battery life seems to be a bit longer on the ZEN when watching movies. Less when only playing music.
- Radio is another feature which the ZEN has nad iPod doesn’t. On the downside, reception is really bad and you’re better of with a normal radio.
- Connector: On the ZEN there is a headphones output and that’s it. iPod offers lots of additional hardware which seamlessly integrates due to the iPod connector, but nothing like that exists for the ZEN.
- Microphone: The ZEN offers a built-in microphone with volume level display for instant recording; iPods require additional hardware to do so.
- SD card slot. This is the ZEN’s strong point as for a modest price, you get an excellent image backup tool for digital photography. The ZEN is able to copy the images from the SD card onto itself without the need for a computer. This was my main reason for buying it.
To summarize, the Zen looks good, is convenient for digital photography backup, serves as nice image viewer and offers SD card and microphone recording. IF it works (which in my case wasn’t often) it’s also a pretty good movie and MP3 player. It is nowhere near as good or convenient as an iPod (with it’s scroll wheel, seamless iTunes music and podcast integration standard supported connector and superior stability).
