On Sun, 2007-09-23 at 11:48 +0100, ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
It's some weeks since I last had a look around using Google Maps, and I did it again last night (with both Earth and Maps). It seems to me that the terrain images used have degraded.
1: They seem to be fuzzier, and with less vivid colour, at the larger zoom levels
Bury St Edmunds is brighter, but fuzzier and at large zoom levels looks more like a scan from a printed picture than it ever did (now you get fuzzy noise like on on scanned print whereas before it was more like compression artifacts but the overall image detail was much sharper)
2: I'm sure they are older
Bury is definitely older, it used to be about 2-3 years old but looking at developments around the town where ground hasn't even been cleared on the map I would put it at circa 2000, maybe even earlier.
The only positive improvement is that Bury is now a consistent state across the whole town, whereas before the town was split North/South with much lower resolution towards the south.
I wonder if this is what they have done, as many towns were a patchwork quilt of smaller areas taken on different days (with different brightness levels and resolution) and in doing so they have sacrificed the age/quality of maps in some areas for uniformity.