Safari Image quality

[johny5]

I couldnt help but notice when i loaded up the same page on my pc and mac side by side that the safari version of the page had very poor pictures, ie you could see loads of artifacts of the jpg compression.
The page I loaded was http://www.apple.com/startpage/ and you can see the picture of mr Mac and mr PC stood side by side. On the pc it was really crisp yet on the mac it was blocky as hell!

I have tried looking through Safari prefs but dont see anything anywhere that would indicate picture compression?

Another point I think I should make is that the mac is a macbook and it is running over a 54g network, so I thought maybe it realised that the speed wasnt up to scratch and therefore adjusted the picture quality itself?
Needless to say I did plug in an ethernet lead and after a couple of refreshes the page loaded and the pictures were perfect.
Which sort of answered my question? but 54g is a fast enough speed to have high quality images and I thought I should have the choice of selecting this myself?

I have searched through the forum and safari's help but found nothing that I am looking for

 

[mad jew]

Umm... I didn't think Safari did this, but I could be wrong. I guess a good way to test your theory is to use a different browser on the Mac too, like Firefox, and see how the images turn out when using either connection.

 

[Eric5h5]

Another point I think I should make is that the mac is a macbook and it is running over a 54g network, so I thought maybe it realised that the speed wasnt up to scratch and therefore adjusted the picture quality itself?

No, Safari doesn't do that. You can load stuff on dial-up and there's no problem with quality (it just takes a while...). I have no idea what the problem could be...never heard of anything like that I'm afraid....

--Eric

 

[mkrishnan]

Sometimes images load up progressively -- say, every second or every third scan line is loaded, and then it goes back and fills in the gaps -- so that it can fill up the space more quickly. Also sometimes there are geometric equivalents to progressive scan so that the image goes from being blocky to being fully formed as it is loading.

But in either event, this should only be visible while the page is still loading. You shouldn't need any kind of refreshes or anything else for it to finish. You should only notice it when your connection is slow or the site is being slow for some reason, while you're loading the page.

 

[fugit555]

I have the same issue

I have exactly the same problem. I bought a brand new imac about 4 weeks ago and it was fine until about 4 days ago, when suddenly the picture quality is awful! I have tried everything, downloaded all the updates, checked all the plug-ins, re-loaded the leopard disc, deleted then downloaded safari, all with no success!! the image quality is still the same, really bad - in fact I have never had this poor quality before and I am going mad on how to fix it!

 

[clevin]

post a screenshot maybe.

 

[Wendel75]

Does anybody have an update on this? I have been experiencing the same problem recently. I have tried installing FireFox, but was experiencing the same problem.
Regards,

Wendel

 

[Wendel75]

Update: still not sure what caused the picture quality to turn bad, but I did find that after emptying the cache (Safari -> Empty Cache) all the newly loaded pictures look fine again.

 

[Wendel75]

Update: like somebody before me I also find that the problem only occurs if I connect to the internet in a certain way. If I connect through WiFi in my house there is no problem, while the pictures get blurry if connect with my mobile device... :S any suggestions?

 

[Lumi]

I have noticed that if you mouse over some degraded images safari gives a little pop up and tells you to hold shift and press the "R" key to improve the quality of the image.

There must be some way to disable this image degredation, it's really annoying.

 

[Henk van Ess]

There is a reason for this. Some mobile providers compress images without asking you first. If you want to restore the images in the full format, reloading the pages won't work because the images are already cached in a blurry way.

Emptying the cache, as suggested here, solves this - only after restarting your browser. If you want to avoid this forced compression, here are some suggestions how to do this:

http://tenmov.es/2007/12/25/how-to-load-full-quality-images-on-vodafone-dongles/

There are some rumors that even your ISP does compression while you are sitting home, not using mobile bandwidth, fe http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/remark,16621553