Creative Zen Vision W Review - Picture Capabilities

Photographers and other digital camera enthusiasts are always looking for extra storage and ways to transfer their pictures from their cameras to a hard drive where they could be stored and viewed if possible. Today's digital camera storage cards go from one, two and even four Gigabytes but at this range the prices tend to go up and many people simply can't afford them.

Depending on the manufacturer and the brand of the digital camera the storage cards used vary, the most popular ones are Compact Flash, Secure digital, multimedia cards and XD cards. With so many types available it is hard to find a single portable hard drive which supports all of these formats and that would allow us to view the pictures in their original resolutions.

MP3 and portable video player manufacturers have stepped up and created several devices which are compatible with digital camera's memory cards in order to transfer the pictures into the device allowing the photographer to see all of the pictures taken through a series of thumbnails and then viewing them in their native resolution. The Zen Vision W by Creative is one of the devices which meets these characteristics. The manufacturer of this great device created a special adapter which can be plugged directly into the player which allows the transfer of photos directly from the picture card into the video player, the device then stores all of them into folders and shows them in it's wide screen using a series of thumbnails which makes it very convenient to browse and find the ones you like.

If the 480X272 screen size its not enough, there are other useful features which lets you enlarge, zoom and rotate the image which might also be cropped with the device and used as a wallpaper, however the picture itself remains untouched so the worries of ruining a good picture by cropping it on the player are gone. Another great feature is the motion JPEG playback capability.

The player was designed with a 30 GB hard drive for its basic version and a 60GB hard drive for the next version. With such storage capability the player exceeds any memory card and provides the ability to handle several multimedia types such as video and audio. Photographers also have the option of carrying around a laptop but in many cases this is very inconvenient because of it's size and weight.