Review on Enhance your Entertainment: Introducing the Creative Zen 20 GB Portable Media Center by George Miller

Conclusion: If you have $3-400 for a portable player, a personal media center is the gold standard and Zen is a solid choice . A great but expensive audio/video companion, sturdy enough for kids and with room for everyone's favorite content. Details: I've been using the Zen Portable Media Center ("PMC") for a few months now and have found it to perform solidly. Zen is about the size of a VHS cassette or a large PDA (remember the Newton?). It fits snugly in one of the slots in my laptop bag (which I suspect was designed for a large laptop battery), and the foldable leather case folds out into a stand when sitting on a desk or lap. The first thing you'll notice is - if you have a PC running Windows XP Media Center Edition ("MCE") - the PMC's user interface is the same as mine, with easy scrolling selections for videos, photos and music . The toggle control on the left was responsive and allowed me to quickly move the selection up and down. The volume controls on the right are a bit small but easily accessible, and since they require firm contact, they won't be accidentally bumped. And the audio/video playback controls on the right are easy to understand and use, as we were able to quickly navigate through video clips: a quick press of the button skips a few seconds, while holding the controls fast forwards or rewind. through content. Content is loaded into PMC via Windows Media Player 10 (WMP). Unlike other reports, I had no problems loading content. Software over WMP 10 is handy and fast - I found file conversion on my Media Center PC about 1/4-1/3 faster than real time (with 1 hour showing - edited to 42-44). minutes - encoded in about 30 minutes). Once you have your audio and video playlists together, click the Sync button and away you go. I set up a bunch of files to upload the night before my flight and found that all files were successfully converted and uploaded to PMC. Note the conversion time: Files recorded on the MCE PC must be down-converted to PMC format. Screen size and PMC resolution - that takes time. But the quality is very good: I have converted several series, cartoons and feature films without noticeable video artifacts and excellent sound. Some people note that the conversion can take about as long as the show's runtime - this seems to be affected by your PC's processor speed, so I found that while it wasn't a speed daemon, it worked fine. In terms of operation, the ultimate test is how quickly my young children get the hang of it: within minutes they are having fun watching their favorite cartoons (and rewinding and re-watching their favorite passages). My kids had no problem holding it and looking between the two, using a headphone splitter to accommodate them both. An added bonus is the AV-out on the PMC, which connects to the included mini-jack cable that branches out to separate RCA AV plugs: while at the hotel, kids (and parents!) were grateful to be able to watch their favorite shows at the hotel. Room TV which (fortunately) had RCA inputs. Quality issues have been noted for live-action films (because the resolution is lower than MCE content), but very good for animation. How to download movies from DVD is covered in other posts. For playback purposes of the movies I recorded on my MCE, the movies looked and played well. And "While some have complained of smudges on the screen, I found it to be fine and easy to clean with a damp cloth. The controls are solid, with good forward and rewind functions: if you pause a movie and come back to it later, you can pick up where you left off (nice feature). Battery life was great, I was able to get through six hours without any noticeable issues. (Please note that when charging for the first time, you need to charge the battery overnight and install a small switch inside the battery compartment - the instructions for this are clear. Overall, Zen PMC is of high quality, great design and very good workmanship. The result is a durable product that should last a while. A lightly padded case has enabled it to survive a few drops off the floor (and Creative offers an extended aftermarket warranty covering knocks and bumps.) Pros: TFT screen in excellent Quality, Video Playback, Battery Life, UI, Good Bundled Software, Solid Build and Design Cons: Screen smudges and no SD card support like newer devices.