by Axel on Wed Feb 04, 2009 4:51 pm
I see your points but it is the way zooming was designed in FPV. As a user I don't see the point in zoom animation (if it's what you refer to as smooth zoom). I prefer instantaneous in and out zooming and this is how the program was designed to behave.
If you refer to pixel smoothing, the program deliberately scales pixels in integral increments (2x, 3x, 4x etc) and no pixel smoothing is applied as it ruins the very purpose of the zoom function, which is to quickly assess sharpness of high resolution DSLR images. With pixel smoothing the zooming beyond 100% would becomes useless for that purpose.
As for "zooming out", i.e. fit large pictures in the current window, the program uses linear filtering in software rendering mode. This does not produce the best possible output but it's the only way to achieve near-instantaneous resizing. In hardware accelerated mode the program uses multisampling which produces a reasonable output without aliasing, comparable to bicubic filtering offered by most viewers, only 1000x quicker for truly instantaneous in/out zooming.
FPV is a culling tool, it is designed to help quickly decide if a picture is worth keeping or not and speed is a key design goal for all of its features. Admittedly, they may not be optimal for general viewing, fortunately there are numerous alternative with richer feature sets, starting with Windows's own built-in Photo Gallery.
About panning, you can lock/unlock the 100% viewing mode with the Enter key. On 102 keys desktop keyboards it's easy and quick to reach the numeric keypad's Enter key with the thumb without even looking down (assuming you are right-handed and holding the mouse on the right side of the keyboard).