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

@hede,

The example images do not appear to have the same aspect ratio.
Could you please provide the original 800x600 image for testing?

Actually re-sampling and saving an image at a different size is going to cause some image degradation.
Especially when each 10 pixels of width is reduced into 3 pixels of width.
Any resizing application has to average some of those values.
Bigger originals will re-size to better quality than an 800x600 reduced to 30% of the original.

Displaying at a different size in a browser is not the same thing.
The uncompressed image is in memory and your graphics card is making some decisions on how to best display that image at different zoom levels.

Some server questions:
- What version of GD is installed on your server?
- Is ImageMagick installed on your server?
- How much memory is available to PHP?
This info is available on the PHP Information page in the Joomla back-end.

Please provide the original image as I would like to do some resizing tests.
Generally manually resizing images yourself gives you better control than any automated system.
I would like to see how resizing this particular image in high-end tools will compare to what phpThumb does with it.

Also, please provide a link to the page(s) where you have this image displayed.
I would like to compare the results on your server to the results on my server.

KM

@kenmcd: Thank you! here we go, image attached

version of GD is 2.0
ImageMagick 6.6.0-4
memory_limit 72M

You're right, resampling comes allways with quality loss which is why I asked for a new option in fc content module and FIELDimage: crop + scale + use original. Images resized to the exact necessary size via e.g. Gimp and then uploaded and not touched by php are a lot better qualitywise.
The risizing of images in web pages is actually done by the browser engine, not by the hardware (graphic card). That is why people who remember lte IE6 still have in mind browser resized images look bad, fortunatelly those times are over.

Link to the site which is under construction: weiss.jordymedia.de/

... Im really embarrassed, I cant reproduce the situation with the blurred thumbnail. As far as I remember that was produced eather by FIELD[image] or more likely by the flexicontent module.
Rigth now I use Field HTML as Image whitin the flexicontent module which allows to set the quality of thumbs to 100 in the FIELD[image]. That works ok.

Cheers