Paul Markham Review

Overview:
Paul Markham is the man, man. He's, like, the guy when it comes to pornography starring adorable teen cuties. He somehow coaxes these MILFs-in-training out of their shells of shyness, inviting them to undress seductively before his camera. Not only do they get butt nekkid, they also get downright playful. These cuties certainly open up to each other, figuratively and literally speaking, as well as with some studs who, by the way, might have the only job better than Markham's.

After plugging in your log in details and hitting the main page, you'll immediately notice that, unlike many other teen websites, Paul Markham Teens features a hefty dose of hardcore fuck action as well as solo girl stuff. That's always great to see, and in Markham's introduction he explains just what he likes in a potential model. "My personal preference is for teens with a smile that says to me, 'A fuck is definitely possible'; that and two girls or more getting into some hot lesbian action, anal action and videos with a girl masturbating to a real orgasm." He also says that the most important aspect of his site is its realism. He's a "real person shooting porn" but really, what else could he be? A robot shooting robot porn?

The website design may look pretty dated, but it still functions. The site can be navigated via a top-of-page menu bar, which contains links to Teens, Couples, Video, All Content and Models Index (categories that are also listed pictorially on the main page). You can also opt to use the more detailed menu system located on the left hand side of your page. This menu features links to a search engine, site map, favorites as well as some more strictly defined content categories, lesbians, boy/girl, vibrator, anal, et al, and the site's supplementary content, games, jokes, stories and interviews. As you can tell, there's quite a bit to get through so let's hop to it, shall we?

Browsing the model index, you'll see hundreds of cute teen girls, most of which have that exact "a fuck might be possible" expression on their faces. After perusing the listing, which is broken up into alphabetical pages, and settling on a teen hottie, the next logical step is to click on her image, right? Andrea, a short haired, dark featured gal, is just one example of the standard of models here and, considering I just chose her to be our passive guide around the site, she must be pretty gorgeous. Andrea has only done two scenes with Paul, both of which are shown on her profile page along with a brief comment from Paul about how he met her and came to have her on his site.

Video scenes are branded as such thanks to a big, red Video watermark on the preview image. Video listings also show the runtime of the scene, date added to the site, some keywords and a pretty telling synopsis from Paul. After clicking on a scene's preview image you'll find yourself at quite an ugly download page. There are no further preview pics on display here, nor is there any other information about the video. Instead, the page is comprised of a table that offers up all the various downloadable and streamable videos as well as a user voting system and an error reporting field. Not only is this page quite ugly to look at, its functionality is pretty low rent, too. The video format table tells us that this scene of Andrea's is available as WMV and "High Qu WMV", both in full and in a number of chaptered parts, each of which can be streamed or downloaded. There's also a video sample that's only available in what appears to be the lowest quality WMV format. Once you decide on which file you'll be saving, a mouse click will bring up a small alert window informing you that, when saving the file to a location on your hard drive, you'll need to add the ".wmv" extension manually. What kind of operation is this? Is Paul Markham such a tightwad that he can't hire someone to make his website, dare I say it, user friendly? Most of the newest videos are available not only in WMV format but also iPod-compatible MP4s and cell phone-ready 3GP and 3G2 formats. The lower quality WMV files feature 512x384 pixel resolution whereas the "High Qu" version hits a much more pleasing 720x540. Both of these look pretty good, although there's definitely room for improvement when even the highest quality videos don't impress too much. The MP4 clocks in at 320x240 pixels and just barely plays at an acceptable quality. The image is highly pixilated and plays choppily, making it seem like the rushed encoding job it probably is. The cell phone formats sound promising in theory but every time I downloaded and opened the zip files that supposedly contain these videos they were unable to properly extract for playing. Yikes. I finally found one that would extract and, well, let's just say you should only bother if you can't imagine going anywhere without some of Paul's porn.

Photo content should be a much simpler affair, right? Well, sure, but it's not without its mini-dramas. Back on the model page, photo set listings show not only a synopsis and set of keywords like their video counterparts but also a direct link to download a zip set of the entire photo set. Well, it looks like a direct link, anyway. In fact it's a link to a page that tells you that your zip file is being assembled while you wait. Once one member has downloaded a zip file for a certain gallery, every other member can download it without waiting, or so it says. You're also informed that you can only download one zip file at a time and attempting to download a second will cancel the first. Jeez! What a bunch of baloney! The pictures better be worth it, that's all I can say.

The photos? Well, they're ok, I guess. The photo gallery page shows around 40 thumbnails per page and said galleries are usually two pages deep. Above the thumbnails there are two kinds of links: one that leads, again, to the zipping/downloading process page and another that will take you to the model or models' profile pages. The thumbnails look blurry and not exactly enticing but on I must press, clicking willy-nilly until I find something worthwhile (or not). I pick an image at random and find that it's available in three resolutions: small (600x800), medium (768x1024) and large. In every gallery I checked, the large images were exactly the same resolution as the mediums. After bashing my head against the refrigerator in frustration, I persisted.

The content does have quite a bit of range, tapping both softcore and hardcore classifications. Although some of the models are kind of fugly, many are not and wouldn't look out of place on a more sophisticated adult website than the one whose pages they currently grace with their presence. The navigation around the site is a pain in the tuchus, with troublesome page design making it either difficult to find some links or impossible to determine the purpose and function of those you can spot.

All of this drama (and some hot content) is all yours for only $29.95 a month! Wait a second? Almost 30 bucks a month and you get a site that's this poorly made? Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself with a 3-day limited access trial membership for only $2.95. Now let's do the pros, cons, conclusion and ratings and get the hell out of here.

Pros:
- Some of the models are undeniably adorable and can be seen engaging in some hot solo, lesbian and straight hardcore action.

- The content is all original and mostly exclusive.

- Updates come daily and feature a good helping of new content.

- The search features are quite handy and well worth using.

Cons:
- The horrible site design makes browsing the site a pain in the retina. Not only is it unattractive, the navigation and download processes could be a lot simpler and stronger.

- There seems to be some content rotation going on. From various reports I've found that content seems to be removed from the site to make room for new stuff, only to find its way back to the update schedule between 30 and 90 days after it went offline.

- The video downloads could definitely use some more preview images so you don't have to download a chapter of the video to find out whether or not the scene looks any good.

- $29.95 a month is way too expensive for a site that is this irritatingly difficult to use effectively.

- The video resolutions vary quite a bit.

- Even though I didn't experience it, I've heard complaints about painfully slow download speeds.

-There's a daily 2GB download limit.

Conclusion:
While there's some very good teen content currently hosted at Paul Markham Teens, there are far too many annoyances, irritations and frustrations that go along with membership for me to strongly recommend it to anyone but the most die hard teen porn fans. Shoddy web design, irksome downloading processes and a steep membership price all add up to an iffy web surfing experience.