Most of you probably know that Playboy is going to release all its magazines in digital form. So far they’ve released
Playboy Cover to Cover, the 50s and all other decades are to follow in six months intervals.
If you want to see how the digital versions of Playboy magazine look like, then go to
www.playboyarchive.com. There are 54 free to browse issues of the magazine online from each of the years 1954 through 2007. You will need to have Silverlight (Microsoft’s version of flash) installed in order to browse through the magazines.
The only problem with above site and the presentation of Playboy Cover to Cover editions is that the online version is way superior in quality to the DVD version you would purchase in stores. What you see online is not what you get if you order the collection on DVD.
Bondi Digital Publishing LLC, who is responsible for the transfer of the magazines to digital form, went overboard with compressing and resizing of the pages for the DVD collection. A DVD can store about 4.7GB of data and they only used 1GB of that space for Playboy Cover to Cover, the 50s collection, so the lack of space is probably not the reason why they would over-compress the files on DVD.
Here are a couple of screen grabs of the same page; one is from the DVD and the other one from online version of the magazine. The difference in quality is quite obvious.