Why is the quality of images resized by FC so bad?

In the attachment you can see the difference: image (800x600 to 240x180), left resized by the browser and right resized by FC. Thumb quality is set to 100.

we updated php thumb to v1.7.11 from v1.7.9, but i don't think that is relevant.

At some place the images may use fixed quality,
you have not mentioned where are these images

is it item or category or favs or tags view?
is it category view with blog template?
is it universal module?

As far as I remember that "bad quality" thing happens allways no matter what. It definitely happens in FC content module, Field[image] and category blog view.

Is that of any help?

For category layout of blog template and for FLEXIcontent module the quality is fixed to 95, but you can check by opening category_items.php (blog template) and helper.php (flexicontent module) and finding lines like:

$q = '&q=95';

you can change these lines to

$q = '&q=100';

to see if it makes difference for you

-- Also try changing the use as resizing method "crop" instead of "scaling"

Thanks for the tips. Now I use in FLEXIcontent Module [mod_flexicontent] the Field HTML as Image which uses the thumb produced by the FIELD[image] where one can specify quality and place of the thumbs. That turned out ok. I couldn't see any difference in qality beween scale and crop.

BTW what I found strange is that every FC function stores the thumbs in a different place. A global place configured in global setup would be very beneficial I think.

We have 2 kind of thumbnails:

a. the image field thumbnails which are created once via phpthumb, these are stored in specific thumbnail folder defined in each image field (these are not recreated until you change the thumbnail dimensions)

b. URLS using phpthumb to create thumbnails on the fly, these are --cached-- by phpthumb itself