Magic Tricks

The instruction is absolutely great, which I've come to expect from Dan Harlan. The lighting, framing, and audio quality are also great, which I've come to expect from things filmed in the P3 Studio. However... And this is a BIG however:

The video is awfully, terribly tiny, which ruins the utility of the video. There are so few pixels that it's hard to see details in the instructions, especially the details of sleights and instructions.

How few pixels? The video is less than a quarter of a megapixel. This is less than 8% of the pixels that the cheapest iPhone, 16e, has. The video has less than 10% of the pixels that Samsung's budget Galaxy A16 5G has. It's less than 3% of the pixels that a 4K video has.

This content was recorded no earlier than 2014. DVDs were already popular a decade before that--DVDs are usually 480p or 576p, compared to this video's 360p.

But these aren't from the DVD era. There's almost no way it wasn't recorded in at least Full HD (1080p). And now that it's 2025, storage and bandwidth are cheap. There's no reason not to offer these in their original master resolution.

I reached out to Penguin support about this, thinking I had clicked the wrong button or configured something wrong. Nope. I was told, "we do not have a way of getting a higher quality video over to you."

Why do I sound so upset about this? I don't regret spending a tiny amount of money on the Sampler to figure this out. I'm bummed because the Dan Harlan's instruction was so good, the updated content was so copmelling, and the quality of the lighting, sound, and framing was so good that I was excited to go buy Tarbell: Every Trick In The Book. But if it's only available at 360p, I can't justify spending the hundreds of dollars that I would otherwise have gladly spent for the series.