I was expecting the Landsat images to be something like satellite view in Google maps. I realize that close-up views in Google maps are collected by airplanes, not satellites. I'm not expecting to see individual cars and houses in the Landsat images, but the images I looked at were very disappointing.
The ones I downloaded were TIFF files, 8k x 8k (or sometimes 16k x 16k), 16-bit grayscale, covering large areas (~100km square), and if I zoomed-in the image quickly became blurry.
With photos that I take with a digital camera that are only 2k x 2k, I can zoom in quite a lot and see a lot of detail. The Landsat images seem to be much larger than they need to be for the level of detail they provide.
EDIT: To give an example, here's San Francisco that I zoomed-in on and cropped:
http://imgur.com/IoRFgCu
You can see that zooming more will not make it better. Is that the best we get from Landsat?
Also, why does the download contain a dozen files (named xxxB1.TIF, xxxB2.TIF, xxxB3.TIF, etc.) that seem to cover the same area?
The ones I downloaded were TIFF files, 8k x 8k (or sometimes 16k x 16k), 16-bit grayscale, covering large areas (~100km square), and if I zoomed-in the image quickly became blurry.
With photos that I take with a digital camera that are only 2k x 2k, I can zoom in quite a lot and see a lot of detail. The Landsat images seem to be much larger than they need to be for the level of detail they provide.
EDIT: To give an example, here's San Francisco that I zoomed-in on and cropped:
http://imgur.com/IoRFgCu
You can see that zooming more will not make it better. Is that the best we get from Landsat?
Also, why does the download contain a dozen files (named xxxB1.TIF, xxxB2.TIF, xxxB3.TIF, etc.) that seem to cover the same area?