Windows XP Photo Preview SUCKSSSS!

[eravedesigns]

So my friend on this forum shorty6049 was showing me some of his pics that he file transfered to me through AIM and I was looking at them in the windows xp photo previewer and they were super soft. So after arguing for a while and him persisting he sent me a jpeg through imageshack file hosting and it was night and day with the sharpness.

Here is the comparison the left on is the jpeg and the right one is the soft high res image in the previewer....please tell me you see this as much as I do.

 

[shorty6049]

I find that so weird that imageshack would be sharper than viewing a full-sized image in windows. Anyone know what could cause this??

 

[Josh66]

No idea why it's happening, but that is a huge difference!
(Look at her necklace.)

 

[Garbz]

Interpolation. The windows version is better.

When you resize anything to display the picture should be interpolated. That is if you reduce the picture by a factor of 3 when viewing for example at 33.3% the viewer should examine the picture in a grid of 3x3 pixels and then render a final pixel using some interpolation algorithm.

Admittedly window's interpolation algorithm is too soft. BUT its much better than the firefox picture you are displaying. That picture isn't sharp, it's simply thrown away a good chunk of the pixels to display at that size. It uses the "nearest neighbour" algorithm, where when reducing the picture just selects one of the pixels in the 3x3 grid to render the final.

You say sharp, I say nothing but unnatural jagged anti-aliasing. If you zoom both images to 100% you will find they are truly identical. If you're not happy with it though I suggest look at a thread about image viewers: http://www.thephotoforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=117015

 

[frXnz kafka]

Interpolation. The windows version is better.

Yep. The perceived "sharpness" is just bad resizing. Maybe the MS Preview version is a little too soft, but the Imageshack version just looks bad.

 

[TamiyaGuy]

I've always thought that the Internet Explorer version of image previewing was much worse than the Windows version. I don't think the IE one anti-aliases the picture very much, which makes the picture more "jaggy", whereas the Windows one does, making a softer, but more realistic, photo.

Try Google-imaging a high-res letter A, for example (so high res that IE needs to resize it). When IE does resize it, the text looks really jaggy and awful, but if you look at it in Windows, it interpolates the image.

 

[frXnz kafka]

Try Google-imaging a high-res letter A, for example (so high res that IE needs to resize it). When IE does resize it, the text looks really jaggy and awful, but if you look at it in Windows, it interpolates the image.

http://outcampaign.org/promo/scarletLetter.gif
The right side is the most noticeable (make sure you have auto-resize on)