Digital Playground Review

Overview:
Digital Playground is a title that conjures up images of 1s and 0s scooting down slides and hanging from monkey bars. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how much you love binary language), that's not what this site is all about. If you haven't heard of Digital Playground then you must've been cleaning your mother's attic for a long time. DP, as it is commonly referred to, is a pornographic film studio located right in the heart of Porn Valley, CA. This site is their flagship online endeavor and features all the superhard fuckfests you'd come to expect from such a distinguished and successful outfit.

A highly professional web design is one of the first things members will notice once logged in. The main members' page offers up a pretty hefty amount of information, with newest and upcoming movies & galleries taking top priority. This is also where the navigational tools first make themselves known. A graphic menu at the top of the page links you to the various sections of Digital Playground: DP Girls, Movies, Photos, Virtual TV, Live, Extras, Search and Favorites. Seeing as most of you are here mainly for the videos and photo galleries, let's focus our attention there - but first we should check out the girls.

Hitting up the model index brings a very important fact to your attention: there are a ton of superhot pornstar babes here. The official DP contract girls are shown at the top of each page of the model index and for good reason. Some of the most delicious and delightful women in porn have signed with, and only work for, DP. Jesse Jane, Janine, Tera Patrick and Jana Cova should be names that are familiar to most of you, but since I really like the looks of Stoya I'm gonna go with this newcomer. Stoya got her start at God's Girls, but has now moved up to mainstream porn courtesy of the folks at DP. Her alternative style has already won over a lot of fans and is sure to increase her popularity with every scene she does. Her profile page gives us a nice portrait photo as well as some vital stats and a bio. With a lean, all natural body, she sure looks built to fuck.

Stoya's movie scenes are laid out beneath her profile section. She only has six available vids at the time of writing, but you can be sure there'll be more added very soon. After deciding on a scene to watch, Jack's POV 9: Scene 03, for those that are curious, and clicking the link, we're taken to a scene page which displays not only a screenshot from the video in question but a performer and category list, runtime and more scenes from the same movie. A simple click of the Watch This Scene button should get things really started, but upon loading the subsequent page it becomes apparent that there are no download options for the videos. Sure, you can stream them and they look very nice indeed, but surely there must be a way to download the clips! Not so - even a download protection circumvention program I used didn't allow me to save the Flash movies. You can make the video play fullscreen and at low or high defintion, but don't get any ideas about keeping it for later use. DP have put their foot down and, man, do they wear heavy boots.

For those of you out there who aren't completely put off by the concept of only streaming videos, you'll be pleased to know that the fucking action is rather varied and almost always extremely hot. The women are spectacularly good at their jobs, and seem to relish the attention paid to them by the camera. There's everything from blowjobs to bondage, footjobs to facials and all roads in between. Women of all styles and ethnic backgrounds are represented fairly well and there's a hell of a lot of content to choose from.

Photo galleries are pretty hard to fuck up but, you guessed it, Digital Playground did just that. Opening a gallery looks promising, with an average of 50 thumbnails staring back at you with the promise of super-detailed sex pics, but ultimately the whole photo aspect of the site is let down by embarrassing omissions similar to the video section. When you open an image, it appears in a flash-based sub-window at only a fraction of its real size. To view it in full resolution, which is 1024x681, you have to ctrl click the pic and select view image (or whatever Windows users do). Sure, the full size images look pretty great what with their "professional photographers" and "Full Dimming Softbox lighting systems," but that is once again wasted due to the thoughtless exclusion of full-sized images. I suppose you could always just enjoy the zip archives. Well, you could if there were any. Ouch.

While the web design is very professional and the navigation ain't too shabby, the model index is at least one area that needs a lot of work. I've got no problem with the constant placement of the contracted exclusive models at the top of the page, but there's no reason the rest of the models' thumbnails should be so tiny and sloppily arranged. To find someone who isn't part of the exclusive roster you have to click through an inordinate number of pages due to the site's omission of an alphabetical index component. If there's one thing that ticks me off, it's a poorly arranged model index. Well, war ticks me off too, and people that talk or shift around in their seats at the movies, and guests that won't leave, and ...

You know it's time to end a review when the site has you ranting about your miscellaneous loathings, so how about we wrap it up? Membership will set you back a nickel under 30 clams per month. Egads! That's a bit rich. As for the site in general?

Pros:
- The videos look really good and stream pretty quickly.

- There are a lot of super-foxy dames online, including the damn sexy official DP contract girls.

- The content is original, so it all has that Digital Playground "somethingness" to it.

- Aside from the model index, it's pretty easy to find your way around DP.

- There's a limited trial that'll cost you $4.95 for three days.

Cons:
- $30 is too much for a monthly membership to a site with so many problems.

- No zipped galleries! Frustrating presentation! Man, the image galleries are very annoying, especially 'cause the pics look like they'd be super hot once expanded.

- Videos are updated only once a week, photos two to five times in the same period - and for a company with such a wealth of product, that's very disappointing.

- It's always pretty much a deal closer when a site won't allow you to download any videos. I mean, isn't that pretty much all anyone wants from a porn site anyway?

Conclusion:
I still can't really comprehend how a company as popular and successful can be so out of touch with what their consumers want, nay, need from their service. Downloadable videos - is that too much to ask? I understand wanting to protect your product from piracy and whatnot, but when I watch porn I want to do it my way on whatever device I can throw it onto. If they're going to keep their membership price at the rather lofty sum of $29.95, there's a lot of work to be done to make this site worth that price.