Browsing 5 GB - 9 GB Creative
Creative ZEN 8GB MP3 Player Best Buy
Creative ZEN 8GB MP3 Player Best Buys. Compare prices and features on this Creative ZEN 8GB MP3 Player!
See our New 2006 range of cheap Creative ZEN 8GB MP3 Player for laptops and notebooks. Listed below is the cheapest price for the Creative ZEN 8GB MP3 Player with Amazon UK.
Popularity - 116. The lower the number the more popular.
Price - £89.99 Correct as of 03/04/08
Average User Rating - 
View Reviews
To purchase this product from 
at the great price of
£89.99 click the 'buy now' button below or click
Buy Now from Amazon.
Back to Top
5 Reviews for Creative ZEN 8GB MP3 Player
Tried the other, now bought the best - 30 Mar 2008
0 out of 0 found this review helpful.
Looks great, easy to use menu, and with diffenrt size memeory available, the option of adding a memeor card (which is why I got it in the first palce), and a radio, it already ticked the boxes, with the video, photo & mic it justs gets better. Really sharp pictures & crystal sound (earphones arent great), I love it.
There is one thing missing, the possibility to SHUFFLE your tracks.
Still you cant have everything, and I loved ii so much I bought another for my dad!
A Problem with Quality Control? - 30 Mar 2008
0 out of 0 found this review helpful.
I was delighted with my Zen. I got two weeks use out of it before it failed, and was able to get my money back, no problem. It crashed after playing three songs every single time that it was used. What kind of firmware bug is that? The SD card was not integrated to the main memory so it had no functions available except Play All. There was no auto backlight off and the battery only lasted 14 hours. The screen was of low quality plastic and scratched too easily compared to competitors. I would never watch video or photos on it, so the large, vulnerable screen is pointless. The radio basically didn't work. The web site proved useless. So out-of-play was it that things must have improved from this version 1, or else they would never make any money. 100% returns is not what is reported elsewhere. So, cross your fingers, yours might not be a dud. Creative might have discovered a concept called quality control and installed some resistance to corruption of firmware.
Good music player but let down by the extras - 29 Mar 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful.
I've recently bought one of these for my mother. I chose this over the ubiquitous iPod as she wanted to be able to listen to fm radio as well as playing music.
As a music player it seems perfectly competent. The controls are not as slick as an iPod, but fairly useable. The build quality is ok, and it's a nice size. Sound quality is good, though the enclosed headphones are weak. The screen is bright and clear.
Where things go wrong is on the extra functions.
The fm radio is not worth considering. Reception on most stations is so poor as to be worthless. In the house where other radios are fine, it couldn't pick up Radio 3 at all and barely could get Radio 4.
The included software is adequate but uninspired, and sadly won't rip to mp3 format (wma only) without paying more money.
Also (though this is true of many other similar players), there is no included mains charger which means you need to leave your pc on to charge it.
Overall, it seems a reasonable choice as a music player, but don't get fooled by thinking it is a radio replacement too.
The Middlemans View - 28 Mar 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful.
If you're like me the reason you're looking at the Creative Zen is because you've served your time with Ipods and their problems and want to use something different. After reading several reviews of this product, both on the web and through others with similar devices, I decided to purchase an 8gb Zen.
One thing I have noticed about the Zen 8gb is that like all other 5-10gb players it hits the 4 star category - good at its job but far from perfect. I think alot of people who are considering this device need to really think about what they want out of their player, as in my opinion, if you want masses of storage buy an Ipod, If you want cutting edge sound quality buy a Sony Walkman, if you want a portable video/photo viewer buy a Zen Vision+. If on the other hand you want something that does a little bit of everything then this is the device for you. As far as bang for buck goes, this product falls in the upper-range and I'll tell you why.
First, I'd like to mentioned that if you want a day in day out Mp3 player thats not going to be anything more than something you listen to music with and browse the occasional photo this is for you. It's reliable, simple and pretty robust, though don't expect the screen to last too long without some form of protection. On the plus side to this device, despite what others may say, the Software is actually pretty stable. In three months of nearly constant use being lugged around university, cross country travel trips and Gym Workouts, coupled with a nearly everyday switch back and fourth of files I only needed to reset the device once using the reset button. This greatly beats my Ipod experience where I was resetting the thing every other day as It hung up on the Apple Logo. A second boon of the thing is the battery life. Nearly every other player I've had has run out after about 10 hours (Worse on most colour screen devices). One of the real benefits of this thing is that its battery lasts around 20 hours continuous play and only takes 2 hours to fully recharge. As a bonus it also doubles up well as a digital FM radio when you grow weary of your playlists. As far as sound goes I've not had any problems and I suspect that alot of quality issues other reviewers try hold against the player stem from either poor encoding of files, or the fact that they don't realise the cheap headphones that come with the player (like all other players) are what they are - Cheap and tacky. I really recommend buying a set of decent earphones, as frankly it seems silly buying £90 worth of gear and using 50p speakers in the first place.
Now for the bad: One thing that I am disappointed with this product is lack of useful software. One big issue is that if you don't fully name and give an album title to your MP3 files the device won't recognise them as loose files when you go to view them by Artist or Album. Basically you end up loosing them in the Ether of the device, and its a real pain to find them again. Though, I've been told on the grapevine, that this is being looked at by Creative for the next firmware upgrade - alot better support than the Apple 'if its broke throw it away' approach. Second the software package that comes with the player is a real pain to learn at first. I tried for ages to condense the videos I wanted into a suitable playback form and was told the format (.AVI which IS supported by the player) was invalid. I was also really frustrated to find that video encoding is quite unweildy on the device unless you plan to spend a weekend encoding videos for use on a long journey or holiday. Along side this, the software does not allow you to make Playlists on the fly very well. Instead you can only copy the referemces of the album your listening to to a playlist and add them to another list - this means you just end up copying the album out to another folder, where if you try delete tracks to clear the list up it actually deletes the file itself from the player. Again a firmware upgrade will fix this problem. For now though you need to go to a PC to do this, which really I find a bit of disappointment as flexibility is a really important requirement in devices these days. The final bane I have with the device is that you won't find many accessories in stores for it or with it. You instead either have to buy direct from Creative or use Amazon, ebay etc to find what you need though it should be noted this is no real fault of the device.
In final notes I should point out that I put my device through a Spin cycle in the washing machine. Yes it's broken now, but its been so good that im buying a new one.
So in conclusion, if you want a decent mp3/picture/occasional video player for under £100 Buy this, if not go look elsewhere. It is that simple. Alot of people are also complain that the device is cheeky about advertising other creative products, yes it does come with promotional videos and pictures but in response to this I think its nice to have a device where you only see these adverts once and can then delete them. Compare this to the Carpet Bombing adverts you get everytime you log onto Itunes or even watch a Mac Visualization with an Ipod attatched and you'll quickly realise that Creative have the better of the two marketing schemes.
3 little words - 20 Mar 2008
0 out of 0 found this review helpful.
ive had mine for 2 months and have waited before writing this review, so far the only "faults" have been the quality of the supplied earphones ( but the ones on my old ipod were no better), the lack of mains charger ( which didn't matter as i had a compatable charger ) and the less than instinctive method of creating a playlist.on the plus side, after changing the earphones for my normal "in ear" set the sound quality has been great and certainly loud enough, video playback which i didn't expect to be useable at the reselution used is in fact very watchable, obviously it wont replace a dedicated viewer or portable dvd player, but it is more than adequate to cover the hour i spend 3 times a week whilst waiting for my son's karate and i've even transfered recorded tv off sky+ to my pc and then onto my zen to watch in work ( during lunch break of course ).
however the best thing about the zen is NAPSTER TO GO !
not wishing to pay a fortune for a large number of tracks or use illegal downloads i was attracted by napsters to go service where for £15 a month you have access to unlimited downloads and can download to 3 devices per account. all i needed was a player that was compatable. the zen fitted the bill and doesn't need to have any extra software firmware installed unlike some players.
if you really like your music and like me tend to collect tunes purely on a whim after hearing them once, then id recomend both napster and this player, in fact ive recently ordered a second player for my partner to share the service, which is a major complement as she's on a fine art degree course and surounded by ipods all day and was going to get one till she tried my zen