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This seems like a Rogue Amoeba promotional post. Why scale up an image simply to scale it back down? It's pointless and may be there just to bulk out an already
by 3-cheese-sundae 4y ago
This seems like a Rogue Amoeba promotional post. Why scale up an image simply to scale it back down? It's pointless and may be there just to bulk out an already short article.
It could have been summarized with one sentence: "Scaling up old interfaces for modern displays looks better with nearest-neighbor interpolation than other options." Which is also not necessarily true, as the retro gaming crowd would attest.
This is the weakest HN post I've ever seen.
- kmill 4y agoAh, but they didn't say they used nearest-neighbor when scaling it back down. This gives a (theoretically) better result when you want to scale up by a non-integer factor. (If it ends up just being an integer factor then there's no need to scale things back down.) This feels similar to how you can generate high-quality square waves at frequencies that don't evenly divide the sampling rate. You generate it at a higher sampling rate, band limit it to the Nyquist frequency of the destination, then downsample. Otherwise there is aliasing phenomena that gives unwanted audible artifacts. For nearest-neighbor resized images, I suppose that would just appear as pixels of varying sizes, which is not nice to look at. Scaling it down antialiases the pixel so they optically look the same size.
- 3-cheese-sundae 4y agoGreat information, thanks. That's the sort of depth I'd have liked to see in the original article.