Creative Zen Vision
The Agony and the Ectasy

This group of pages, a work in process, will chronicle my experiences with the Creative Zen Vision "personal media player."

No problems with audio: it is the equivalent of a 30GB iPod.

It will synchronize its "contacts" database with my contacts in Outlook -- which means I can leave my PDA at home when traveling. However, my contacts are broken down into three sub-folders and the Creative software will ignore them unless I first move all the contacts into the "contacts" folder itself.

For digital photo (.jpg) viewing, I found that the brightness and gamma adjustments that I made to get an optimal display on my Samsung SyncMaster 213T (1600x1200 LCD driven digitally by an nVidia graphics card), were not optimal for display on the Zen Vision. Further experiments need to be done, and I will post the results to this site.

My current focus is video, because I want to replace my Toshiba P2000 portable DVD with the Zen Vision. The Toshiba is just too large and heavy for convenient use on airplane trips -- and extra batteries, for really long flights, only make the Toshiba larger and heavier. So, to improve on the situation, the Zen Vision -- small, lightweight, with paper-thin extra-capacity batteries -- seemed the perfect solution.

Almost...

There are really three problems:

  1. The Zen Vision's LCD (3.7" diagonal, 640x480) is simply not a "vivid" or "dazzling" display. Its resolution is top-of-the-line, but video images all appear kind of dark and definitely undersaturated.

  2. You know the joke about "NTSC" meaning "Never The Same Color" -- well, commerial DVD material varies quite a bit in overall average brightness and saturation, and many DVD's (like Hunt for Red October, StarTrek/TNG, and American Beauty) appear dull and undersaturated even on my 42" Panasonic Plasma TV. At least the TV has controls for boosting contrast, brightness, and color. However, the Zen Vision has no such adjustments -- only the LCD backlight can be adjusted.

  3. The software demo package that comes with the Zen Vision, Video Vault, offers only 320x240 compression -- pointless with a 640x480 display. Other 3rd party software, particularly MagicDVDripper, does a fabulous job of converting DVD video to Divx video (with properly synchronized MP3 audio), with convenient, automatic filename changes at each chapter or program title. However, MagicDVDripper does not have the ability to adjust the color qualities of the DVD "signal."

As a result, for $400, plus $35 extra for Magic, I get to watch 30GB of dark, murky, undersaturated movies, with no way around the problems above.

I tried several additional software titles, including VideoMach (by Gromada) and Video Perspective (by River Past). However, both packages are utterly incapable of producing an AVI output file with Divx video properly synchronized to MP3 audio -- at least "properly" synchronized in the opinion of the Zen Vision's AVI video splitter and MP3 decoder. While the original rip done by the Magic product has perfectly synchronized MP3 audio from start to finish, all post processing by other programs fails to maintain that synchronization. Typically, the audio drifts off the video by 1-3 seconds per 10 minutes of video.

At least VideoMach contains color adjustments that gave me an opportunity to test the theory: if I apply color adjustments to the original DVD video, I can get a very acceptable (still not "wow! outstanding!") video result on the Zen Vision.

By the way, in my experiments with Divx encoding, I found that most movies convert to the Zen Vision with virtually no visible/audible difference between an encoding rate of 750kbps video, and 192k MP3, and 550kbps and 128k MP3; 1.5mbps video is a waste. At the 750 figure, a 2-hour movie encodes into an 800MB file; at 550, the file is 600MB -- quite a decent viewing experience at 600MB.

The following pictures, taken as screen captures directly off of my Samsung LCD, will give you an idea of the degree of the "weak video" problem on the Zen Vision. This is one frame from Star Trek - The Next Generation, "The Perfect Mate."

This picture shows what the Divx video looks like when converted directly from DVD to Divx by MagicDVDripper. This picture accurately represents the appearance of the video when played on the Zen Vision, and also accurately represents what the original DVD looked like on my plasma TV (with all "standard/default" adjustment settings):


This next picture shows the result of converting the Divx above to another Divx using the VideoMach product (it has a wide range of on-the-fly color corrections). This would be acceptable to me, even though I'd be "double-encoding" the file, except that the audio gets converted from the original MP3 (output by MagicDVDripper), to plain "PCM" (.wav) format, tripling the size of the output file (unacceptable). This picture fairly represents what the converted video file actually looks like on the Zen Vision -- not "outstanding," but acceptable, and a whole lot more "viewable" than the picture above.

The Good News

After considerable experimentation, I have found a repeatable, reliable process for converting my library of purchased commercial DVDs into Divx-compressed, color-corrected files that play on the Creative Zen Vision with a decent appearance. Four separate components are required:

All of these packages provide full-feature evaluation copies so you can try-before-you-buy.

AnyDVD works as a DVD device driver, and removes the CSS encryption from any DVD on-the-fly.

Magic DVD Ripper is used to transfer the DVD to hard-disk while encoding it at a high Divx bit-rate.

Virtual Dub is used to re-encode the Divx movie to a lower bit-rate while applying contrast, brightness, gamm, and saturation adjustments. Within practical limits, these adjustments over-compensate for the visual elements that the Creative Zen Vision will under-display, thus yielding a fairly reasonable and viewable image on the Zen.

The step-by-step instructions for converting DVDs to the Creative Zen Vision, including screen captures of all dialog boxes showing the exact settings you need to use, are presented on the following pages:

The Missing Component

As yet, Creative offers no stand for the Zen Vision that can be used, for example, to hold the Zen Vision at a comfortable viewing angle during long airplane trips. So, I built my own:

Why does the Zen Vision's LCD produce a sub-standard display?

The following comparison between the pixels on the Zen Vision's screen and the pixels on a high-quality LCD panel designed for computer use shows as least one major component of the cause:

As you can see, fully 1/2 of the Zen Vision's LCD panel is dead black! Blame Creative's marketing folks: they specified a certain retail price point ($399), and the engineers gave them the best LCD that that amount of money could buy.

As to the very narrow viewing angle reported in other reviews and forums, the effect is far more pronounced when viewing very dark images. With a dark image, the difference in viewing angle between your left and right eyes is enough to produce some very "other wordly" effects.

However, by boosting the brightness/contrast/gamma/saturation of the overall image using the process described on this page and this page, the viewing angle issue becomes far less restrictive, and the difference between what your left and right eyes see is almost undetectable.


Note: I own personally purchased copies of the DVDs that I am hoping to transfer to the Zen Vision. I think, in spite of lawyers to the contrary, that I'm covered by "fair use."

Click here for my home page.

Copyright 2006 by James P. Smith. Last updated 01/22/2006.

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