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Archive 2017 · Macbook Pro 15.4" w/Retina and blurry web images

  
 
mortyb
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Macbook Pro 15.4" w/Retina and blurry web images


I'm checking out a new MBP 15.4" with the "Retina" display (2880x1800).

Issue: All photos here on FM (and on other sites) look slightly blurry and lack crispness. This is very noticeable when viewed side by side with my old HP 17.3" 1600x900 laptop where everything looks tack sharp and crisp - as it has always done.

So I've been trying to examine this a bit.

Under System Preferences ---> Displays ---> I've tried the different "Scaled" options. Even at highest res. mode ("Looks like 1920x1200"), images here on FM are still a kind of blurry, only smaller. This goes for both Safari and Chrome. Also been trying different magnification in Safari and Chrome, but no difference in sharpness to speak of.

This may be a showstopper, to be honest. I spend a lot of time browsing images online. As it is right now, my old HP laptop works way better doing this.

Is there a way around this? How do I get true 1:1 pixel? Or any other solution to get the same crisp image display of my old HP? I'm new to Apple, so maybe there are some hacks that I don't know of.



Sep 29, 2017 at 02:35 PM
melcat
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · Macbook Pro 15.4" w/Retina and blurry web images


First of all, forget about using Chrome for viewing photos on that MacBook. It has a wide-gamut screen, and Chrome's colour management has been broken for a year or more on Mac.

Safari's scaling is controlled in two places. First of all, the web site can specify it. In conjunction with a @media query, you choose a different scaling factor or pixel width, such that you trick Safari into not upscaling images as it normally does on retina screens (it does that to preserve the relative sizes of text and images). The trick is reasonably well known, I use it in my own galleries, and it makes a difference on my iPad.

After this stage, the user can set a "zoom" themselves via the View menu. Choose View | Actual Size menu item (COMMAND 0) to turn this off (you want it greyed out).

Modern websites use "responsive design", which means they instruct the browser to resize elements like images rather than selecting different sizes on the server. So your quest for 1:1 is doomed to failure: increasingly, there is no such thing.

Safari uses the GPU to do tbis scaling and it is excellent on my Mac Pro. MacBooks do however come with a battery-saving feature in which they can turn off the main GPU and use the "integrated" one. Maybe Safari has to do it less well on that - you should make sure the GPU is turned on in Settings.

It might also be that what you're seeing is oversharpening on your HP laptop. There's a wrong way to scale images which results in that. On Mac, Safari doesn't use this wrong method, so it will not sharpen images that really are soft.

This site, both the desktop and iPad-specific version, looks great on my iPad Pro.



Sep 30, 2017 at 12:40 AM
mortyb
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · Macbook Pro 15.4" w/Retina and blurry web images


Follow up: I've been testing some more.

Sites like 500px.com and flickr.com look really, really good on the MBP. Very crisp and nice, just what I would expect of the MBP display. They look much better than on my old HP.

However - images on this site, fredmiranda.com, looks clearly worse on the MBP than the old HP. The difference is "night and day". It's about lack of crispness when viewed on the MBP. Details, like branches etc., are clearly less crisp and more blurry than on the HP. It doesn't make any difference if I click on the images or not.

I would guess then that it is down to differences in how these sites are coded. It's beyond my knowledge.



Oct 08, 2017 at 02:13 PM





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