How to get CLEAR photos on the Touch?

Question

I love my iPod touch, but there's one thing that has always bothered my - photos sync'd through iPhoto-->iTunes are grainy and have bad color. Until now, I've been unable to prove this - but finally I've found a way to prove that it's not just in my head. So, I'm wondering if anyone knows a way to get clear photos on the Touch ... ?
First of all, after using the app "PhoneView" to download my sync'd pictures from my iPod BACK to my Mac, I've noticed that the resolutions are different for pictures, depending on whether their orientation is portrait or landscape. For portrait 4x6 images, the resolution is indeed 480x320. However, for landscape orientation, the resolution is consistently 640x426. I think it's kind of odd that iTunes would be sizing photos differently depending on their orientation ... I usually have my full-resolution pictures in iPhoto and sync those images through iTunes, but today I also tried manually resizing my pictures to 640x426 (landscape) and 480x320 (portrait) and then syncing them as a folder, rather than through iPhoto. The results were the same as doing it through iPhoto: disappointing. I've put together a sample, below:
!http://www.mavisxp.com/ipod/iTunes_compression.png!
and another example here.
As you can see, even the manually resized images are turning out horribly grainy. What's even more disappointing than the image quality, however, is the file size: my original JPG is 84KB, but the iTunes' "optimized" JPG is five times as large (456KB) with inaccurate color and awful grain to boot. I mean, it looks like someone dribbled a basketball all over a glossy print (seriously, that grain's pattern is an exact match with the grain on a basketball) ... Is it supposed to look like that?
+After examining the EXIF data for both pictures, I've noticed another oddity which explains the bad color at least - when iTunes 'optimizes' pictures for the iPod, it apparently assigns them your monitor's color profile! Was this just an oversight that has yet to be corrected? When I export my pictures from Lightroom to iPhoto, I always use the sRGB profile because it's the most standard profile to use when sharing pictures (posting online, emailing, etc) ... My iMac's color profile is a custom Spyder2Pro profile, but that profile is only accurate for THIS MONITOR - certainly not my iPod! Anyway, I've uploaded the original pictures if anyone is interested in checking them out - you can download them in a zip archive here.+
This is the second iPod I've noticed grainy pictures with, so I know it's not just defective hardware. So I guess my question is simple: does anyone know of ANY way to get clear photos sync'd with the iPod Touch or iPhone? I've poked through plists in iTunes.app and preferences, etc - but I haven't found anything. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Thanks for the reply, Duddo.
I guess you're right, Apple probably just wanted to simplify the syncing process and make it consistent for all users. And no, most users probably won't notice that awful grain and poor color reproduction.
That said, I think it's a real shame to waste the capabilities of the iPhone/Touch like this. Wasting storage space is asinine (increasing file size 5X when 'optimizing'?!) not only due to the limited storage space available in the first place, but also due to the fact that smaller files are quicker and easier to load and manipulate. Overwriting color profiles is just sloppy coding, an oversight - hopefully one they'll soon fix. But the biggest problem for me is that the pinch/zoom functionality is USELESS because if you zoom in at all, the grain is so blatantly obvious. I found an old discussion thread on another forum which mentions this problem, according to several posters there, the grain problem was introduced AFTER the iPhone launched (meaning it can likely be corrected in a firmware update or an iTunes update) ... You can check out that discussion here, if you're interested:
http://www.everythingicafe.com/forum/iphone/not-optimize-photos-8264.html
Anyway thanks again for your reply. I'll keep my eye on this thread and if I hear anything about this issue (or a workaround) I'll be sure to post it!