Some of our products have patterns on them. The attached, as an example, has a nylon pattern. On the Mac/Firefox the image looks great, but on the PC/IE6 it looks severely distorted.
Is there anything I can do to fix this, or is this just part of the down-scaled image for the zoom feature?
I have found this to not work well also, and removed the slidier bar completely for now. I hear in verrsion 1.0 they are making changes to the images where we only need upload 1 image and they will resize it, perhaps this zoom feature will work better then. Or maybe we are just doiing something wrong , but I find most of them don’t zoom at all. And with cookware it doesn’t reall matter much, so I just removed the whole feature, at least for now.
I’ve decided to remove the slider component all together and go with a “Click for Enlarged View” method instead. If Magento can integrate a 1-image-to-rule-them-all method, similar to Scene7 (http://scene7.com), that would be absolutely amazing!
MagicZoom seems like an interesting solution. The thing I don’t like about these zoom features is the user is forced to load the high-res image, whether or not they even want to view it. Seems like bad usability to me. I’d rather give them the option to view (and load) the high-res image, making the site faster overall?
Considering usability, some pros and cons of preloading images…
Pros
+ The zoomed image displays immediately which is the best possible user experience. If you were to download the image only when it is requested, the user must wait a few seconds while it downloads.
+ The rest of the page loads as fast as normal because the high-res image only downloads after everything else.
+ In the case of Magic Zoom, the zoomed image displays on mouse rollover. This is more intuitive than having to click or drag, therefore a good user experience.
Cons
- Preloading the image uses extra bandwidth (which you pay for) because it is downloaded whether the user looks at it or not.
My choice is to preload it because bandwidth is cheap and the better the user experience, the more likely the user will make a purchase.
Simple Helix - We only released the Magento module yesterday, so we don’t know of any live Magento sites it yet. (We installed it in a test site of our own, but that’s not live). Yours could be the first!
Baschti - The demo version of Magic Zoom has a message saying “Please upgrade to full version of Magic Zoom”. The full version (£25 for a single website license) has no message, plus you get 30 minutes of free tech support if you need help installing/customising it.
