I have a Leica Digilux zoom, same as Fuji MX 1700, in many printed pictures, even as small as 5x7, I get "zippers" on straight lines and strong blocky pixelization around small black objects such as eye glasses. The zippers are bad enough to ruin the photo. Any fixes? Software, settings on the camer, printing suggestions? I use epson phto 1200 and ulead and photoshop.

-- Don Evans (seiudevans@earthlink.net), April 06, 2000

Answers

Don: I think you are seeing the blockiness artifacts produced by JPEG compression of files - they are particularly noticeable on sharp edges, e.g. lines or text. Is it possible to save the original in- camera images as uncompressed TIFF files? If so use that.

If not,try a very small amount of a Blur or Smoothing filter in Adobe Photoshop, Corel PhotoPaint or similar programs, perhaps followed by judicious Unsharp Mask filter. (If your program has a preview for these filters, use to judge the strength of the filter settings).

You might want to convert the original JPEG file to a TIFF file before these changes, 'cos every time you modify a JPEG file and then save it, you lose a little bit of quality, i.e. more 'blockiness'.

Good luck!

-- Mike Saxon (msaxon@brunet.bn), April 13, 2000.

Read through the www.imaging-resource.com reviews for the Fuji MX 700, 1700, 2700 models. I recall seeing a similar complaint in one of them. It seems to me that Dave thought that the solution was to set the in-camera sharpening to SOFT instead of NORMAL. Check it out. You also need to make sure you're using the higher resolution settings with the least compression to get a larger file size which is likely to show less jaggies.

I often used the soft setting on my PDR-M1, preferring to do my own sharpening, although the in-camera was pretty good.

Good Luck

-- Gerald M. Payne (gmp@francomm.com), April 13, 2000.