BBC homepage

The main picture on the BBC homepage has for a few weeks now been of rubbish quality. The use of jpegs is making the image 'fuzzy' around the text. This never used to happen.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/home/images/main_promo/picture_promo/planet_earth_ep1.jpg

yes it does look pretty bad.

same with citv though
http://granada-images.adbureau.net/granada/CITV_Sonic_240x600_Mar06.jpg

What file format is normally used?

It's interesting that they've started using PNGs for programme name text on the themed homepages. It'll be good to see this format take off, especially when the PNG-supporting IE7 is released. I think one or two other browsers don't support this format completely, which is unfortunate.

Here's the latest image currently being used on the home page...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/home/images/main_promo/picture_promo/jam.jpg

I know, it's horrific isn't it!

It's only following on from Digital TV & Radio that use awful, artifact ridden compression. Why not the images on the website too? Considering JPG allows various amounts of compression, surely they would be better off using a lower compression rate?

More bad artefacting on today's splash; which also very cleverly doesn't fit an 800x600 frame!

http://www.nodnirgkram.f2s.com/stuff/planetearthbbccouk.jpg

There must be some self imposed rule on the size of the background image for those without broadband.

Pleased the colour scheme reflects the image though. Makes a nice change from all that blue.

Didnt the colour change daily a few years back.. we had orange, purple , blue ...under "BBCi"I think.

Yeah but who uses 800x600? No-one.

Quite a lot of people, looking at one of my sites' stats on Google Analytics 5.8% still use 800 x 600 screen resolution.