ellusionist.com VS penguinmagic.com, My opinions

After seeing people over at a hell lotta' magic forums discussing and cursing away our this topic. I felt that I should give out my opinion about this whole damn thing.

First up lets make this clear okay Ellusionist products empahsize on presentation and Misdirection While Penguinmagic products focus on the effect of the trick. Alot of people fail to realize this and thus they go into arguing with each other. Considering the fact that Ellusionist products are based on presentaion, some of them are really simple tricks but which be explained in a few words. But Ellusionist is able to sometimes make DVDs worth than 1 hour of runtime just by teaching you on how to present the trick so that even a trick so simple will just seem like a miracle in the eyes of the audience. Such example will be tricks like the revolution coin vanish and Infusion. Penguinmagic on the other hand, has a totally different approach to this situation, they just focus on the key points of a trick and elaborate on that. Thus, some of the more complicated tricks require set up or gimmicks. And there are also able to elaborate some really complicated tricks like the ultimate ace assembly in less than 20 minutes an yet allow the buyer to almost fully understand the slieghts involved in the particular trick and also how the trick should be performed.

Due to the fact that the companies follow almost totally different approaches to their products, they have their advantages and disadvantages. First lets start up with ellusionist.
Ellusionist- Advantages: - thier tricks are mostly impromptu
- slieghts required for most of thier tricks are not very complicated
- thier videos teaches alot of presentation ideas and also instruction how to misdirect the audience when needed in order to do a move succesfully in the trick.
- Bonus effects are somtimes included

Disadvantages: -Some of thier tricks are so simple to perform that you would want to kick yourself for buying it and feel ripped off.
- Some of thier videos are just boring
- Some times brad christian is not a good teacher at all (there are times when his teaching was excellent.)

Penguinmagic- Advantages: - Thier instruction are short simple and nice.
- free shipping!(US only)
- Oz Pearlamn is an excellent teacher
- Focuses on the key movements only so video are short and sweet

Disadvantages: - sometimes, key movements from certain tricks are not thaught in detail as you are expected to buy them seperately.
- Tricks sometimes would require sleights that are hard.
-The background music in thier videos are not of a wide variety thus make you fustrated if you buy many instant downloads from them.


Conclusion - Well, I have given my opinions, its up to you to choose which is better, but I still feel that both are the same.