Can retina display fix this?

[calvinc]

Images in Safari always look grainy when zoomed in. On the other hand, text is always crystal clear. What causes this? Is there anything Apple can do to fix this?

 

[marksman]

All images?

Most people who build websites use images of a certain quality level and compression so it looks good at a certain resolution. This saves downloading and space.

If you zoom in on an image it very well could look grainy, it most likely depends on the quality of the image itself.

 

[KFujiwara]

Unless it's a Vector image, all images will eventually become blurry when zooming in (the iPhone does stop zooming at a certain point though that might not make some images blurry). There's really no way around that, even if you zoom in using the screen zoom function on a Mac. Text on the other hand is something generated by the browser after interpreting a web site's coding, so it isn't limited to the quality that an image is. That's why when you zoom in on text it will always look somewhat clear.

 

[ovrlrd]

This question reminds me of the times in movies or tv shows when they need to find a killer by zooming into a photo.

"ENHANCE!"

Sometimes you just can't get more data out of the pixels, nothing you can do.

 

[sammich]

Text is defined by a series of curves and whatnot. So a computer can continually zoom in cos it knows what shape it is.

An image is defined as a series of coloured dots in a grid. The computer has no idea what it looks beyond how detailed those dots are.