In Masterpiece, Tabitha Stevens plays an artist who uses her sexuality to connive, to create, to sell...all in pursuit of the almighty dollar. Twisted is director Phil M. Noir's highly-rated take on Edgar Allen Poe as told from a modern-day, hardcore perspective. Both features boast strong sexual performances, with the shot-on-film (16mm, not 35mm as stated on the package) Twisted scoring higher on the production and acting fronts,

As is standard for Digital Playground, both DVDs feature 5.1-channel surround sound, chapter stops, and production stills with slide-show function; they're also all-region compatible, and support parental lock-out. A game of strip blackjack is accessible to those with a personal computer equipped with a DVD-ROM drive.

A note regarding the Quality scares above: On both discs, Twisted in particular, pixelation is noticeable in darker scenes, in areas of low contrast, and during dissolves, fade-ins and -outs. I was about to bust Digital Playground for what I perceived as a lack of effort on their part. But then I discovered something critical: Both discs are encoded at fairly high bit-rates. Some scenes average between 6-8 Mbps, and occasionally peak around 9 Mbps —quite close to the 10 Mbps threshold of current DVD players. Higher bit-rates like these generally translate into excellent picture and sound; obviously, Digital Playground was making an attempt to deliver genuine quality with these discs.

So why the pixelation?  This is most likely an encoding issue, as MPEG-2 encoding, which DVD utilizes, is something of an art as well as a science. And paying a person to sit at a computer and tweak individual frames of your film or video is cost-prohibitive. Mainstream manufacturers do it as a matter of course; most adult manufacturers do it on a limited basis or not at all —some because they don't know, others because they don't care, and still others because they simply can't afford it. I'm not excusing the pixelation —as the less-than-stellar quality ratings show —but I'm not going to totally rip someone who's at least trying to get it right.

DVDs like VCA's Shock, Gen XXX's The Pyramid 1-3, and Vivid's Ancient Secrets of the Kama Sutra show what the industry is capable of when enough time, talent and money are behind a DVD. Undoubtedly, adult DVD as a whole will improve as the science improves, prices for mastering fall, and the personal doing the encoding become more practiced.