I finally got the most expensive portable hard drive you could imagine in my mailbox. Yes, it's filled with every Playboy magazine issue from 1953 to 2010, but that doesn't justify the $300 price (duty tax excluded) for the hard drive.
The main reason why it doesn't justify the price is abominable compression they used on the scanned pages of the magazines. The articles are practically unreadable and the pictures are unwatchable. Even Stevie Wonder would notice that there's something wrong with the quality of the scans on the drive. After a couple of days of using the drive my eyes started to bleed. No wonder you get an ad for
Clear Eyes Redness Relief in January's issue of Playboy magazine, they have to cover their back in case someone goes blind reading this stuff.
I just don't get it. How could they go wrong with this? They've chosen a medium with 250GB of space, and yet they only used 16.6 GB of it for the magazines and the rest is available for your other digital stuff you'd want to store on it... like family pictures for example. I know I'd be more than happy with only 100GB of additional storage and crispy clear scans that I could actually read without going blind.
I know they have a better version of scanned magazines stored somewhere. If you check the free preview issues at www.playboyarchive.com, you can see that they are clearly from the same source, but they are far superior in quality. Why couldn't they put those scans on the drive? Lack of space on the hard drive shouldn't be the problem, lack of brain cells... most definitely.
Since it took Playboy more than three years from the initial release of Playboy Cover to Cover: The 50s DVD to come out with this hard drive, you also have to deal with an outdated reading experience. Forget about putting this on your iPad , Kindle or any other reading device. The only way to read this will be sitting in front of your computer through an outdated Bondi reader, which is used for browsing, reading and searching through the scanned magazines.
Search function in the reader is practically useless. A generic search like "
Pamela Anderson" gets you hundreds of results. When you click on one of them you end up on a page or an article where her name is mentioned. Since the search result is not highlighted, you sometimes have to go through a ten page article to find the exact place where the search term was mentioned. And when every second page ends with "article continued on page..." it becomes a daunting task to find something.
All in all, given the price of the product and poor quality of the scanned magazines, I think they should either recall the product or give an option to download the higher quality scans for those people that purchased the hard drive.
In case you still want to waste your money on this product
you can get it at Amazon if you're from USA or
abebooks for rest of the world.
Personally, I'd much rather get
a one year subscription at Mr. Skin, and used the rest of the money for a nice dinner date. But that's just me.