Stephanie McCarter's translation is worse than Charles Martin's by every conceivable measure aside from brevity. In my opinion, the difference in quality is drastic, and SM's work is drastically worse, unless for some reason you're interested in reading a translation that has the fewest words per line possible (but even this does not entail that her translation is better suited to parallel reading with the original Latin).
I have owned a very cheap, paperback copy of CM's Ovid since October of 2021, and bought SM's version second hand at the relatively high price of $28.86 Canadian.
There are shallow reasons for CM's translation, now, to be overlooked: Penguin, as a very powerful publishing house, is promoting SM, with a profusion of pink carefully calculated to appeal to Gen-Z, making the book look rather more like an off-brand beauty product than an on-brand examination of ancient ugliness, and while I encourage everyone to judge a book by its cover, in this case the one in a plain, white binding (with just a stripe of blue at the bottom, no illustration whatsoever) is the incongruous winner.
I have discussed the high cost of the Latin text in recent (short) videos: it may be worth mentioning that I paid $54.95 (Canadian) for the Oxford edition, commonly sold for a hundred dollars or more, but if you can find it for $80 (and you can) that would still be cheaper than owning the two volumes of the Loeb edition together. And although I identify as a nihilist, I cannot believe that nothing has improved in the editing of the text between 2004 and 1916. Admittedly, when I was reading Pali, I knew of many examples of ancient texts that had only gotten worse in the passage of the same century.
