Texture Rendering quality

Question

Hello everyone,
I'm creating a simple J3D program that contains a flat plane with a texture applied to it. I'm finding that the rendering quality of the flat plane is unacceptable though. The image is very blurred, as though it has been dithered through a 1920's meat grinder. Here are some key points of interest to what I've got so far:
1) The image is a 512x512 PNG and looks fine on an Image Icon or outside of Java.
2) There is no intentional scaling occuring. I'm not scaling with the java.awt.Image class or with a J3D Transform.
3) I've tried setting a variety of Texture Attributes, Appearance filters, and Rendering Attributes to no avail.
4) I'm not using a MIPMap
5) Distance from the Shape3D object doesn't seem to affect the rendering positively. In otherwords, zooming in doesn't improve the picture.
Does anyone know how to get an image to render with reasonable quality? Is there an alternative to using Texture I should be looking at perhaps, or maybe there's an attribute I've missed? I would REALLY like to make the quality as best as possible when within 10 meters of the plane for example, something that would be comparable to what the user would see on a 2D presentation like an ImageIcon.
A sample of what I'm talking about can be seen here. Please ignore the obvious positioning problem.
http://www.carbonatedcomics.com/sample.png
The following is the code of interest.
...<Snippet (frame contains a simple ImageIcon>
        ImageIcon icon = frame.getImageIcon();
        Image image = icon.getImage();
        if (icon.getIconHeight()%2 != 0
                || icon.getIconWidth()%2 != 0) {
            image = image.getScaledInstance(512, 512, Image.SCALE_SMOOTH);
        TextureLoader tl = new TextureLoader(image,
                getPanel());
        ImageComponent2D image2D = tl.getImage();
        Texture2D texture = new Texture2D(Texture.BASE_LEVEL,
                Texture.RGB, image2D.getHeight(),
                image2D.getWidth());
        texture.setImage(0, image2D);
...<Snip snip snippet>
    public Appearance getAppearance(double width, double height, Texture2D texture) {
        Appearance app = new Appearance();
        app.setCapability(Appearance.ALLOW_TEXGEN_READ);
        app.setCapability(Appearance.ALLOW_TEXGEN_WRITE);
        app.setCapability(Appearance.ALLOW_TEXTURE_ATTRIBUTES_READ);
        app.setCapability(Appearance.ALLOW_TEXTURE_ATTRIBUTES_WRITE);
        app.setCapability(Appearance.ALLOW_TEXTURE_READ);
        app.setCapability(Appearance.ALLOW_TEXTURE_WRITE);
        ColoringAttributes ca = new ColoringAttributes();
        PolygonAttributes polyAppear = new PolygonAttributes();
        polyAppear.setCullFace(PolygonAttributes.CULL_NONE);
        ca.setColor (1.0F, 1.0F, 0.0F);
        texture.setMagFilter(Texture2D.NICEST);
        texture.setMinFilter(Texture2D.BASE_LEVEL_POINT);
        texture.setAnisotropicFilterMode(Texture2D.ANISOTROPIC_NONE);
        //texture.setMinimumLOD(200);
        app.setPolygonAttributes(polyAppear);
        app.setColoringAttributes(ca);
        app.setTexture(texture);
        TexCoordGeneration tcg = new TexCoordGeneration(TexCoordGeneration.TEXTURE_COORDINATE_2,
                TexCoordGeneration.NORMAL_MAP);
        app.setTexCoordGeneration(tcg);
        TextureAttributes tas = app.getTextureAttributes();
        if (tas == null) {
            tas = new TextureAttributes();
        Transform3D xform = new Transform3D();
        //xform.setScale(new Vector3d(1, 1, 1));
        //xform.setTranslation(new Vector3d(-.5,
        //        -.5, 0));
        //tas.setTextureTransform(xform);
        tas.setPerspectiveCorrectionMode(TextureAttributes.NICEST);
        tas.setTextureMode(TextureAttributes.REPLACE);
        app.setTextureAttributes(tas);
        RenderingAttributes ras = new RenderingAttributes();
        ras.setDepthBufferEnable(false);
        ras.setIgnoreVertexColors(true);
        app.setRenderingAttributes(ras);
        return app;
...<Snip snip snippet>
appearance = getAppearance(height, width, texture);
this.setAppearance(appearance);Thanks for your time!

Answer 1

Oye, I found my problem. I am loading images with a byte loader. PNG images to be exact. However, I wasn't specifying the format of the images when passing them to my Texture Loader. So, without a format, it looks like the bytes were just being interpretted as a compressed image.
User error.
Thanks to everyone who looked at this post!