strange image quality issues.

kargrafx · 01-31-2004, 06:45 AM

Okay stupid question for a problem I see no immediate solution to. A client has medium to high quality digital images which I recieve as jpg files. I post them on the website for him unedited, and the images all look good.

Yet he, and some of his customers, complain of 'blurry' pictures or 'distortions'. I can't pin down how/why/when they look blurry and distorted, as it seems that even on the same machine, they may look good today and bad tomorrow.

The best I have been able to isolate this 'problem' is that it seems to be happening to people with laptops and/or flat-panel screens.

SO - is this anything to do with my server, the images, or my coding, or is it simply related to their hardware? And if so, is this common, or just a group of nut-jobs who need better glasses?

Thanks!

mindlessLemming · 01-31-2004, 07:46 AM

It may very well be that these images are too large for the viewport, so the browser is down-scaling them. This would also explain why LCD/TFT users notice it more.
IE is the primary culprit here.

rmedek · 01-31-2004, 09:53 AM

could it be a screen resolution issue? I run into that problem a lot-- my images (which are optimized for web in Photoshop at med/high quality) look great in 1024x768 but look blurry and indistinct in 800x600...

Rich

kargrafx · 02-02-2004, 02:24 AM

Hmm, the images range from 20k to 80k, but most are around 40k or so . . . would that cause IE or other browsers to downscale them? If so, is there any way to force the image quality, at a sacrifice to speed?

As to resolution, they do look *best* in 1024 x 768, which is what I optimize for, but before I post anything, I check it locally on every resolution I have between 640x480 and 1600x1200 - they may not look their *best*, but they are not blurry or distorted. OTOH, that may just be _my_ opinion, and to my picky customer, it may be that the minor diffwerences based on resolution are what he is terming 'distortion' and 'blurriness.'

Thanks for your replies; I will look further into this.

mindlessLemming · 02-02-2004, 02:34 AM

The file size is not what determines whether IE resizes. If the height or width of the image is larger than the viewport (not 800x600 or any other standard size, viewport is res. minus toolbars, menus, scrollbars, etc.) then IE will display the image as it sees fit.
The image is still its original size, it is only displayed smaller.
Ask your customer to right click/Save Image As.. and then open the image with an image prog. Is it still blurry?
(If they use Windows picture preview, it will prob resize aswell

)

Andrew