After waiting for three years for Playboy to release a subsequent decade volume to their original Playboy Cover to Cover the 50s release, they finally came out with a new volume.
Well, kind off, instead of releasing a new decade on a DVD every six months as planned, they came out with the complete collection:
Playboy Cover to Cover Hard Drive - Every Issue From 1953 to 2010.
On the 250 GB USB drive you get every issue of the magazine as it appeared in print. From the first issue featuring
Marilyn Monroe in December 1953 to the December 2009 issue, which featured
Joanna Krupa and
Chelsea Handler on separate covers.
All the issues take up only about 20GB of space on the hard drive, so you'll have additional 230GB to fill with your favorite porn.
As in the 50s DVD release, magazine browsing is done through Bondi software, which is compatible with Windows and MAC operating systems. Although, I think you'll have to download a patch from
covertocover.com to run it on 64 bit system.
I am still waiting for my hard drive to arrive, so I can't comment about the quality of the scanned magazines. Some of you might remember that
I bitched about the difference in superior quality of the free online issues presented at playboyarchive.com in comparison to the one on 50s DVD, even though there was more than enough free space left on DVD to put crispier scans of the magazine on the DVD. I only found
one review of Playboy Cover to Cover Hard Drive that touches this subject and it says:
"Zoom levels are useless, and it's very hard to read the text or get a great view of specific photos."
Above sounds awfully like they did it again, and put over compressed scans of magazines on the hard drive, even though they had additional 230 GB of free space to make it right this time.
So, what's the price of owning this fabulous collection? You can
get it for just under $300 at Amazon. International customers will have to buy it from
www.playboyarchive.com, since Amazon doesn't send electronic products worldwide.