Creative Zen Vision W Review - Resolutions

By Author: Ivan Cuxeva Jr
Total Articles: 782
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As the title implies there are several resolutions used to share video on the web, some are meant for streaming video and have a maximum size set and others have a higher quality and can be seen using a TV or a monitor without much quality loss or pixelation.

Basically the bigger we are going to project and blow the picture the bigger the resolution will be needed in the video to meet the demand, meaning that enlarging a 320X240 web-only video to a 52 inch TV will often produce bad image quality, it gets even worse when you try to use a projector, but when it comes to web streaming the 320X240 resolution is optimal and that's why this is the resolution used by "Youtube" to broadcast their videos.

The Creative Zen Vision W supports several formats and video resolutions which can be "zoomed" using pan & scan features, "stretched" to fill the screen or left with the original resolution to keep the aspect ratio.

With the zoom feature or pan & scan the picture is enlarged from the center in order to fit the screen but both edges of the video (left and right) end up being cropped, that's if you have an ...
... aspect ratio of 16:9 if on the other had you have a 4:3 aspect ratio the edges which might get cropped are the the top and bottom edges, normally this feature is used with wide screen or 16:9 videos.

The "stretch video to fit on screen" feature is used to fill the wide screen of the player without cropping the top or side edges of the video, in other words there is no loss through this setting, however if your video is originally 4:3 the actors might look smaller and/or fatter because the aspect ratio is not kept as the original, as bad as it may sound the distortion is not that bad. The player can handle almost any video resolution from 720X640 and lower, if you go any higher which would in fact be HD Video resolutions the player will reject the media because it is not meant to reproduce HD video (yet).