In my “1940 Census Image Viewer Comparison” article I noted how
different websites took more or less time to display images.
Ancestry.com took more than 3 seconds, Archives.gov took about
4, MyHeritage.com took about 17 seconds, and FamilySearch about
34. The most significant factor affecting download time is the
size of the image file. The most significant factor affecting
file size is image quality. Thus, there is a tradeoff between
download speed and image quality. The faster the download, the
worse the quality. The better the quality, the slower the
download. Back on 9 April 2012 in the Monday Mailbox I made a
stupid statement. “The Rowdy” asserted that Ancestry.com had the
highest quality images. I replied that “NARA did the image
scanning so Ancestry.com’s images can’t be better than everybody
else’s.” I knew at the time that websites might modify the
images prior to publication. But it seemed silly to say
something like “Ancestry.com’s images can’t be better than
everybody else’s unless everyone else m