| Review:
(Note: About six months after our review they
substantially upgraded their video.-Eds.)
Velvet Ecstasy is a curious mix. On the one hand it is a long-running
amateur site featuring "real amateurs" in "extremely
candid" video. No bull. It's all exclusive, and the couples (and
they are, apparently, real couples) do have
a "folks next door" and homegrown quality about them. You
might think of the whole thing as a sort of smaller, more professional
(and less amateur?) version of Homegrown
Video. Most of the girls are
pretty without being glamorous and the sex is quite natural.
But this is also an artsy-porn sort of site too. With a name like
Velvet Ecstasy we had visions of Harlequin Romance flashing through our
heads--and those aren't the right kinds of visions to be having when
you're looking for something to get off to. There's a bit of bondage and
multiple partner stuff,
but the really weird clips are the glow-in-the-dark body paint movies.
Bizarre. And not all that erotic.
And yes, it's a red-blooded hardcore site too, with a lot of basic
sex followed up with facials (something of a specialty).
Getting on to the proverbial brass tacks, here's what we didn't like:
The navigation is quite poor. There is a lot of exclusive content
here. The site has been in operation since 1999 and they update once a
week. But from the main page menu there is only one link going to the
"Exclusives" section, with a bunch of other links going to
stuff like "Friends", "Feeds", "Bonuses"
and "Stories". This has the effect of marginalizing the main
content library (the exclusive stuff) out with the extras. And the
extras are surprisingly lame. The Friends are just skimpy sample galleries and
videos for other amateur sites (that is, ads). When we visited there were only four
stories. And one of these was a promo link to another pay site.
Why no model index? That would have been a big help. Or any kind of
search function. Another
design/navigation flaw is the confusing way of presenting the pics.
There seemed to be three types of pics to choose from: vidcaps, small
pics, and large pics. But it's easy to miss the large pics (1024x768)
because they aren't your first option. You have to supersize an
intermediate format to get the pics you want. Grrrr.
OK, the presentation is clunky. But the content itself is quite
professional. There are approximately 150 photo/video shoots. We definitely recommend the pics (once you find the proper
size). They are large and well produced and each gallery has around 100.
Call us contrarians, but we thought the pics were actually the best
thing going for the site. The video, as noted, is basic
hardcore action with the odd bit of experimentation thrown in
(especially weird things with the lighting). Most of
it seems to be shot in the same bedroom set, but it is actually quite well
done. Lighting and camera angles are well handled. Unfortunately, we were
disappointed in the playback quality. The
individual movies are in the 5-15 minute range and are split into
3-minute clips.
But playback is only at 256 kb/s, which really isn't up to industry
standards anymore. We're getting used to a sharper pic.
For $19.95 this is a pretty good deal, especially when you
consider that you're getting five years of archives. But the site is in need of an overhaul in terms of its layout
and tech.
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