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The image on the left (or on top if your browser window size is small) is rendered with compression turned on. The image on the right is how it should look. If both images look the same, then you have your preferences set wrong for viewing this site. Instructions are shown below.
For some reason, AOL decided to add the option to over-compress the graphics at AOL, before they ship the images to you. This over-compression destroys a lot of images, and to make matters worse, they made it the default option. If you have freshly installed a new version of AOL, you must reset this option, or your images will look bad.
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| Overcompressed | The way it should look |
In the above two examples, the left picture is a screen capture of what
AOL is doing when it decodes a JPEG. To the right is the original photo,
also JPEGged, but it should look OK if you are not using AOL. The
examples below give you another example of how bad AOL's compression affects
the picture.
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| Colors are washed out | Extreme loss of detail |
To quickly explain why this is, I must explain a little about the process of compressing and image. There are several ways to compress images, and they fall into two categories- lossless and lossy. JPEG is the most common form of compression, and it is lossy- meaning that once you compress the image, you cannot exactly restore the original picture. Of course, it also offers a large savings in disk space, and you can set how lossy it is.
JPEG algorithms work by examining an image and throwing away data it doesn't think you will notice. By doing so, it reduces the amount of information in a picture, and hence reduces it's file size, which in turn, reduces it's download time. As such, a majority of the photos on this site are in the JPEG format. I have chosen a compression level of 30, which offers a 2-3:1 space savings over the original image, while leaving the picture relatively intact- i.e., you would be hard pressed to notice any difference when compared to the original, uncompressed picture.
What AOL offers you, is the chance to throw out the fact that I used "only" a setting of 30 to compress my graphics, and it recompresses them using a setting of maybe 75. A setting of 100 would be an image of one color- no information at all. The result is a much smaller file, and a much faster image download, but at the great expense of a crappy image. Frankly, the images that AOL gives you when you have selected their additional compression are so unpleasant to look at, I don't really know why they've kept it up through four versions of their software.
To remedy this situation, look at the toolbar at the top of your AOL
window.
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1. Click on "My AOL" |
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| 2. Select Preferences |
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| 4. Click on the "Web Graphics" tab | |
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5. Clear the box that says
"Use compressed graphics" |
Once you have viewed an image in over compressed mode, you will have to clear your cache of that image in order to force the browser to reload it. This is another annoying feature of this browser. The ruined image will stay there for months on end. At least Netscape has a feature called "Super Reload"- undocumented as it is (see the Browser section).
To clear the images and force a reload so that you can view them properly, repeat steps 1-3 above. You should have the following dialog box:
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Click on "OK"
(You don't have to clear offline content- it's up to you) |
A better solution to all of this is to use another browser. Get the latest AOL version 4.0, preferably for Window 95 if you have it. Go to Keyword Netscape and download it. Or, if you have Windows 98, Internet Explorer is built in. You can use it as is as long as you are logged into AOL. Just iconize AOL (reduce AOL to a button on the task bar) and launch Netscape. The same is true for Microsoft's Internet Explorer- the full version that exists outside of AOL.
If you are using an older version of AOL, i.e. 2.5 or 2.0, you must download AOL's version of Winsock.dll and install it per their instructions on your machine. If you are using version 3.0, the dialogs will look a little different that above, but the same options are there. Please upgrade to AOL 5.0 or 6.0 if you are using such an old version.
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