Now with brand new photo viewing capabilities, Creative's Zen Sleek gets a makeover in the Zen Sleek Photo. Sindre Lia takes the updated version for a spin, and likes what he sees.
Review summary of the Creative Zen Sleek Photo:
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 Retaining the roomy 20 GB-capacity, great sound performance and user-friendly music library interaction of its predecessor, the Zen Sleek Photo improves greatly on FM signal reception and boasts a brand-new 262K colour screen. The latter also enables the new Photo Album feature of the player, which - despite being a snappy performer - is in need of a larger screen to truly shine. In summary, the Zen Sleek Photo delivers the goods as an all-round performer with excellent sound output across a multitude of genres sprinkled with good photo viewing capabilities. Release: December 2005. Price: $300.
Pros: Great audio performance; user-friendly music library interaction; bright 262K colour screen
Cons: Mediocre battery life; boots slowly
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Full review of the Creative Zen Sleek Photo:
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A slightly upgraded version of the Creative Zen Sleek, the Zen Sleek Photo measures 59 x 101 x 17.1 mm and weighs in at 157 g. As revealed by its name, the Sleek Photo offers image viewing on a 1.7-inch 262K colour screen, as well as storage capacity for thousands of photos and up to 10,000 songs on a 20 GB hard drive in MP3, WAV, WMA and WMA DRM formats - the latter of which also enables support for online music stores such as Napster and Yahoo! Music.
Unlike the recently reviewed Zen Micro Photo, the Zen Sleek Photo's touch strip provides excellent tactile feedback. An Equalizer harboured by the System menu, provides one custom mode as well as eight preset modes, including Acoustic; Classical; Disco; Jazz; New Age; Pop; Rock and Vocal. The Music Library, another vital selection in the Zen Sleek Photo's user-friendly menu, offers agile browsing by Albums, Artists, Genres and All tracks.
The Zen Sleek Photo also includes a Photo Album application and an FM radio, both of which have received noticeable upgrades compared to earlier offerings. The FM radio shines with great signal reception and auto channel search. The Photo Album, meanwhile, proved extremely quick and responsive, but ultimately needs a bigger screen to come across as excellent.
In use, the Creative Zen Sleek Photo impressed us with a well-balanced musical landscape across all genres, although the bundled set of earphones may very well be less than ideal for some users due to their all-round nature; if you want more thump, you'd better give these the bump.
Connecting the Zen Sleek Photo to a PC requires the installation of Creative's software package, which subsequently enables rapid and hassle-free media transfers. As a small bonus, WAV files created when using the recording abilities of the voice recorder and FM radio can easily be transferred to the PC.
Creative claims a battery life of up to 19 hours for the Zen Sleek Photo; we, on the other hand, experienced a battery life of approximately 10 hours during the test period.
Availability
The Creative Zen Sleek Photo is currently available in Europe and North America, bearing price tags of approximately €300 EUR and $300 USD, respectively.
Price and availability
The Creative Zen Sleek Photo will start selling for $300 () in December 2005.
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