The latest gadget in my personal stable is the Creative Zen Vision. This is the latest PMP from our buddies at Creative, and I’ve had a pretty good time with it so far. It’s not without its quirks, but it’s pretty good at what it does too.

The Vision’s design is head and shoulders above any other player I’ve had lately, with the possible exception of iRiver’s PMC-120. There are separate, tactile buttons for each function. As sexy as touch-panel style controls look, they’re pretty lame when you’re in the car or in the dark. It’s fantastic to have a player that lets you feel your way around when you need to.

I also felt that the Zen Vision would have no problems holding up to a little rough treatment. Creative used a magnesium alloy casing instead of plastic, and you can definitely tell a difference. It feels tough. There’s no flew in any of the joints; as far as build quality, the guys at Creative nailed it.

The Vision comes in white or black, and I opted for the white this time. I sort of feel like I should have gone with the black. It’s not that the white looks bad, but once I got it I started thinking that black is the better color for this player. I think the interface would go better with a black player than with a white one; that may be where I’m not as content with white as I thought I’d be.

The player draws attention. On recent plane ride, I could hear people commenting about it in the seats around me before I stuck my earbuds in. The screen in particular stands out – the resolution comes as a little bit of a shock after so long with QVGA screens. The viewing angles are one area where I could gripe, however. The screen was obviously meant for a PDA in portrait mode, not a media player in landscape mode. Side-to-side viewing angles stink, and your eyes may go a little buggy if you don’t hold the player a little further out than is comfortable. Up-and-down viewing angles, on the other hand, are much more flexible.

The Zen Vision feels pretty good in your hand. It’s not as comfortable for long periods as the iRiver PMC-120, however, nor does it have a kickstand so you can set it on your desk. It does have an optional dock, though, which solves the kickstand problem. and a remote control (also optional). Hey iRiver, hook me up with a bigger hard drive, a remote, and a VGA screen, and I’m your loyal media pal again!

The Zen Vision plays music, movies, slide shows, and TV, and it does it all fairly well. The following formats are supported:

Video: AVI, MPEG-1/2/4-SP, Windows Media™ Video (WMV) 9, Motion-JPEG, DivX™2 4 and 5 and XviD3

Audio: MP3 (Up to 320 kbps), WMA (Up to 320 kbps), WMA with DRM, Linear PCM WAV

My main purpose in getting the Zen was to replace an iRiver PMC-120, so working nicely with my Windows Media Center 2005 PC was priority one. Synchronizing TV was pretty much the same experience; just set up the playlists or auto playlists you want to synchronize, and let it do its thing. I have to note that the included video converter from Creative is pretty bad. It’s faster than using Media Center or Media Player 10, but the videos are terrible. They’re choppy and artifacts are more obvious as well. Until Creative gives us a fix, stick with Windows or with some of the other converters around.

The optional remote is a fantastic upgrade, as is the dock. Together they make playback through a TV or home theater very workable. I was able to sync content from my Media Center and play it on a TV in my bedroom, all very easily. Range on the remote may be a little short for some. I guess that’s not unexpected with the little coin-style battery that powers it.

Creative offers a very nice slide show app. Pictures look great on the VGA screen, though the viewing angle issue made it a little difficult to share (as much as I tried to get past that issue, it keeps popping up! Annoying). JPG images only, but here the included Creative converter works pretty well.

The Zen also has the option to synchronize your contacts and calendar, but at this point there’s nothing automatic about it. It takes several steps to import your information from Outlook, and I didn’t find much use for it. It seemed like it was sort of tacked on to stay with the iPod.

Video playback is solid. I’ve watched a lot of TV and a couple of movies on my plane rides recently, and I’ve been satisfied. If you’re into movies, however, playback on the PSP blows the Zen away. The screen on the PSP is better suited for movies, and the wide format is nice too. Where the Zen beats the PSP is in the ease of getting content loaded and (of course) the big old 30gb hard drive.

When watching TV, the controls seem a little sluggish, and there are times when it will seem to freeze briefly when I try to skip forward past a commercial. This seems like something that could be fixed with a firmware update, since slower machines like the iRiver or my older Windows Mobile devices don’t have this same problem. Quality settings don’t seem to have any impact on this little performance bug, unfortunately.

Music playback is excellent. I listened through my Shure E2C headphones and plugged it into my home audio system through the dock, and found nothing to complain about at all.

Slide shows and TV look very good when played back through a television. You will see some artifacts, but nothing worse than your TiVo on a lower quality setting. The included AV cables make sharing pretty simple, provided your friends know how to change the inputs on their TV (some of my friends could stand an intensive two-week Navigating Your Television’s Menu course).

There are a lot of ways to play your music back. A mode I haven’t seen before is the ‘album of the day’ mode, which is actually just a random album chooser. Kind of nice, I guess, but why? It would have been much cooler to dump that feature and give us ALBUM ART. I know it’s a crazy idea, but we’ve got a great VGA screen here and everybody else includes this feature. The screen looks very plain without something there besides the basic track information.

Well, to sum things up, I really like having a Zen Vision around. It’s a good player. Overall, I have very few complaints. The complaints I do have, though, are much more annoying after a while rather than less. The viewing angle thing can be irritating, but not enough to make me put it on eBay (yet). My advice is go see one someplace before you drop your money on one; that will most likely be the deciding factor. It’s a shame that Creative didn’t work that out before the iPod with video came out, since the screen on that is gorgeous. Those of us who want to see some competition to Apple in the media player scene have to be a little disappointed by that little miss.

Another gripe is the lack of album art. Some people might scoff at that complaint, but it seems so simple to throw it in and it’s a shame to waste that screen when you’re listening to music.

In pretty much every other aspect, however, the Zen Vision is a great player. I still own mine, which generally means I like it pretty well. Stuff I don’t love usually winds up on eBay after a few weeks so I can recycle it into new stuff. With a couple of tweaks, Creative can really make this player shine. Here’s hoping they get us some updates soon!