muddy images at eBay (dark colors)

Care to share a link to something that looks bad to you?

Could be your eyes, could be your monitor and/or settings, could be your ISP--are you using any sort of speed-optimizer with dialup?

Sometimes images do get compressed pretty poorly when they are rendered as thumbnails.

Yeah, but it's only a certain type of color -- dark solids, especially red.

Here are some examples (the first two are mine, the rest are not):
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item...ageName=STRK:MESE:IT
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item...ageName=STRK:MESO:IT

Compare the solid red to the solid blue:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Scarce-CRISIS-Promo-poster-Perez-DE...QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
http://cgi.ebay.com/THE-MASK-19-4th-17th-JULY-1987_W0QQ...QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Tell me it's not just me!

Oh, and nope, no speed optimizer (I'm on cable). And I don't get that muddied look on my monitor. I never notice it until I've got an auction up...

The first one really suffered in the compression for the auction...avoiding the supersize feature would help it a lot.

The auctions that didn't use supersize looked a lot better to me, as did the "supersize" version of the photos.

Some colors do worse than others when you compress them. Another factor is how you compressed them first. They are getting a few doses of it between what you do and what the service does and that can make for some funky results.

I suggest making your pictures a reasonable size and using them full-size. Do a closeup of, say, the drawing on the page rather than show the entire page, complete with huge red background, for the supersize version.

(Note: I don't sell what you sell...so these are generic suggestions and may or may not work for your niche.)