New main site comic layout issue?

BahamutZERO

The comic images on the new main site layout look a little zoomed in or something? A little pixelated maybe? Not sure, the image looks off somehow.

klemming

They've been multiple sizes/resolutions over the years, and now they're having to be resized to be consistent with each other. I don't think there's much they can do about it. Besides resizing them all to a single standard, and I don't think they have hi-res copies of the earlier ones (they did a comic about losing them when a drive died, didn't they?), so that'd only end up being worse.

BahamutZERO

It looks that way on the most recent comic though

eBusiness

At lest for new strips there are two different resolutions available, the browser choose between them using the srcset property, which is set to download the low resolution image on 1x scale screens, and the high resolution on 2x scale screens. In practice this means that most modern phones, retina displays, and any browser set to scale pages larger than 100% will get the high resolution version. Most 1080p screens, a lot of 1440p screens and even some 4k screens are however set up to run 100% size, so they will get the low resolution version, which will be scaled up from native 1050px wide to 1530px wide, which looks pretty bad.

To actually pick a reasonable size the selection parameters that are currently set to 1x and 2x should probably be somewhere around 1100w and 1200w, that will select the high resolution version on most devices, except phones in portrait mode and phones with low resolution displays.

Quick hack for anyone bothered by this: If you zoom in enough on the page it will load the higher resolution version, exact procedure depends on the browser, you may have to reload the page.

BahamutZERO

That might be it, I'm getting a weird resolution comic at 1080p monitor resolution in windows firefox.

Akira13

Yeah, the comics all look like they're being rendered weirdly / stretched from a lower res on my 24" 1080P display, at 100% zoom in Google Chrome. It's a significant quality drop from how the high-resolution files you get when you press "Download Comic" actually look viewed directly.

Protected

Same thing on 1440p Firefox.

But if I zoom in one step to 110% (ctrl+scrollup or ctrl+numpadplus or using the button on the right hand side end of the address bar) I get the crisp version and it looks great.

Akira13

So yeah, what eBusiness said seems to be exactly correct, after testing it more. With that said, it's unclear why the low-res versions even exist, to me at least: why can't the high-res individual panels just be scaled to fit as necessary, as was previously done with the high-res single-image comics?

Edit: here's a visual example of what's going on in Chrome on my 24" 1080P monitor, if it's helpful (I recommend opening it in a new tab to see it at full size).