What's with Windows Picture & Fax Viewer...

<p>Every time I open a JPEG in Windows Picture & Fax Viewer it appear somewhat soft. However, after I zoom in to the maximum extent possible then zoom back out to full view the picture appears sharp. In fact, If I sharpen the image in PhotoShop prior to viewing it in Windows Picture & Fax Viewer it appears WAY oversharpened to the point of being sandpaper-gritty. What is going on here and will it affect the final look of prints.</p>

<p>That piece of software is looking at your full-resolution image, and trying to quickly - on the fly - downsample it to a lower resolution that will fit within the window it's using. Unlike the way that you would reduce its resolution, making judgement calls about when and how to sharpen, simple viewers like that just do it by brute force. Some pixels stay, and some pixels go. And since that approach will leave some jaggy edges, it does a little anti-aliasing, which can make things look a little soft.<br /><br />Could it do better? Sure. But that would take longer, as it renders each image. That app is oriented around quickly breezing through images. Once you zoom in and out, it's caching more of the image's data, and taking more time to re-render the image.</p>

<p>You would be a lot better off using Irfanview as your default image viewer than Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. It's better at rendering the images, and it's the fastest image viewer of all I've tried. There are others, but I prefer Irfanview, because when you click on an image, it just opens it, and nothing else. No image browsers to click away.</p>