I recently had my first hands-on experience with the “new iPad” at an Apple Store.  The screen does look incredible, especially when reading books or web text—the sharpness of the words makes reading an effortless experience.

The one thing I noticed is that many images, especially the ones on websites, look awful if you look too closely. They look bitmapped and pixellated, and you can see artifacts of the digital compression. (Look especially in big areas of one color—that’s often where it shows up first.)

Although the iPhone screen is almost the same high resolution as the iPad, the device is so tiny that rarely are you looking that closely at the images. However with the new iPad, the quality of the images on websites needs to be higher to look good. Most websites aren’t ready for that—plus it takes longer for a bigger picture appear, which is no big deal if you’re talking about 1 image, but if you’re looking at a page with 50 photos, that can really slow down your browsing.

An article by Brian X. Chen in the New York Times, called “Is the New iPad Screen Too Good for the Web?” discussed this same issue.

If you’ve got the new iPad, are you seeing images that don’t look good enough for the new high-resolution screen?

Image by shinya, from Flickr Creative Commons.