If your JPEGs look naff...

If your JPEGs look really bad, with splotching and colour patches reminiscent of MicroSoft's AVI on a good day... You may need to reconfigure your software.

If your software has a "Faster decode" option, make sure it is not set. Otherwise you will get a lower quality image in trade-off for speed.

The way these images should appear (256 colour) is as on the left. The image on the right is an example of splotching due to a fast (or just simply crap) JPEG renderer. If both images look the same to you, you are probably looking at two icky versions!

Examples; JPEG 58K

If your software does not offer a quality choice, or if it decodes JPEGs with pink fuzz in the whites, you should look for better quality software!

 

 

The images were all recorded off-air from a PAL-I signal onto a VHS tape.
The tape was then put into Pause mode for the frame grabs. This was for two reasons - to allow me to select exactly what to digitise, and to let the video deck digital doodah kick in so the frames where crystal clear and not jittery.
The digitiser was linked to the video recorder using the CVBS (composite video) connection. The digitiser is basically a framestore with software that decodes the frame into an image. Each image was decoded at 256 colours, using a 1:2 ratio, and saved as a RiscOS sprite file.
Each sprite was then turned into a JPEG using !ChangeFSI set at 78% quality, except for cdu_05.jpeg which was done at 90% quality.

These HTML pages were then written by hand in the !Edit text editor. Conformance to the HTML 3.2 specification was assured with sgmls.


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Copyright © 1999 Richard Murray