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I recently installed a Debian Jessie desktop and when opening PNG/BMP images it all becomes blurred on zoom (in or out). With the image at 100%, everything looks sharp as expected.

This happens both on Image Viewer and Iceweasel.

When opening the same images on my Macbook, everything is OK.

Does anyone know how can I change this behavior?

jcarvalho
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I think it has nothing to do with the images, but with the software used to view them - both formats (PNG/BMP) are raster graphics:

In computer graphics, a raster graphics image, or bitmap, is a dot matrix data structure representing a generally rectangular grid of pixels, or points of color, viewable via a monitor, paper, or other display medium. Raster images are stored in image files with varying formats. ~Wikipedia

Therefore, there will be a loss in quality when zooming in and out. I think that you are not experiencing the same in your Macbook as it may be using some algorithm to prevent this loss in quality to happen, although it should have a limit as well.

When enlarged, individual pixels appear as squares. Zooming in further, they can be analyzed, with their colors constructed by adding the values for red, green and blue. ~Wikipedia

Are you sure that those images in your Debian system are the exact same ones as in your Macbook? Maybe you have PNG/BMP in the first one, and SVG in the latter.

jimm-cl
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  • Thank you for you answer. I understand what you wrote, but maybe I was not clear. What I expect when I zoom in is that each pixel (matrix entry) becomes a big and sharp square. [Here](http://www.zimagez.com/zimage/screenshot-06262014-101705am.php) is a screenshot, with what I want/expect on the left and what it looks like on the right. But you are correct, it is application dependent. On GIMP the images look as I expect. Is there a way to change it system wide? My main concern is with Emacs (in which PDF files are converted to PNG). Should I somehow change the original question? – jcarvalho Jun 26 '14 at 09:32