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Penthouse – The gentleman’s smut magazine

I remember when I was a little kid my grandmother always used to give me a dollar to go over to the local shop and buy some sweets and chocolate.  On those special occasions when the guy behind the counter was in the stock room or occupied with another customer I always remember having a sneak peek at the magazine rack that had Penthouse featured every week.  Now 10 years on I’m about to review one of the biggest names in the porn industry.  If you haven’t heard of Penthouse then you’ve just been introduced to one of the world’s leading producers of pornography.

The Site

At first, I was slightly concerned with how to approach a review for one of the biggest companies in the world.  However, I always try to give honest reviews and I think there’s a lot going for and against the Penthouse website.  I was slightly concerned with the advertisements placed on the right hand side of the website that linked to three separate websites.  It’s an annoying aspect of any pay site, but overall, the design was good with the exception that the home page forces the most popular videos on to you.  I find that to be a really unattractive feature considering the site updates at least 4 times a day.  The space would be much better used to show the latest content.  Getting around the site is easy enough as the navigation consists of home, videos, models, galleries, pets, live chats, extras, calendar, my favourites, cams, and dating.

I decided to check out the pets page and was impressed with the archive of its world-famous models.   Every year is listed going all the way back to 1973.  For those of you who don’t know, the pets is a feature Penthouse has where every month they nominate their top model featured on the cover of their magazine displaying some of the most amazing photography to be found anywhere.  The images from the early years of Penthouse are totally vintage and I’m sure if your dad saw the pictures he’d have a nostalgia attack.  Overall, the site is pretty decent but doesn’t break any new boundaries.

The Content

The real draw to this site has to be its famous photography.  Every Penthouse Pet from 1973 is displayed here as well as their famous Penthouse forum letters where naughty erotic stories are shared.  Much like Playboy, Penthouse was always about providing high quality images and they certainly deliver online.  Including the hundreds of famous pets, Penthouse currently boast nearly 135,000 photos from around 2,000 models and for the sake of convenience those that are rated the highest are shown on the main archive page but it’s fairly easy to dig a little deeper for whatever you want.  To add to that, you’ll find over 700 full-length movies which average an hour each with nearly 5,000  scenes and internet-exclusive clips that average 5 minutes and 20 mini-strip videos which average 8 minutes each.

What really matters is the dimensions you can download your content in and the real issue with this is the site has archives going back to the 70’s creating a problem when trying to give accurate dimension sizes for photos.  However, for most of the modern content you have the choice of 800 x 533, 1200 x 800, 2000 x 1333 and 3000 x 2000.  I also found some sets that had 4000 x 2667 option which is easily some of the best quality photos you’ll find anywhere. All of the sets had a thumbnail viewer and a slideshow option plus the ability to download a ZIP of any resolution.  Disappointingly, the videos came in a 640 x 360@ 1000 kbps WMV format and the DVDs in 720 x 540 Flash or downloadable in 480 x 360@ 1000 kbps or 320 x 240@ 500 kbps WMV.  This quality of the downloadable video here could and should be much better with a name like Penthouse.

Final Thoughts

The bottom line is Penthouse has a poor site for such a big name, but the content delivered on it is top notch.  Nothing beats the huge resolution images offered in the photos and the babes are out of this world.  I don’t rate the videos too high but what would you expect from a company that started out before the internet existed?  While expecting a better site layout and video options from one of the world’s leaders in quality porn, the site still delivers on content.  Penthouse is a classic and dominate figure in the porn industry and you’ll have access to everything the magazine offers here.  This is a recommended join to anyone who not only enjoys vintage porn now and then, but those that still like to view some of the best photography of some of the world’s most beautiful models baring it all.