Well, happy holidays people!

Edit: Note the quality difference between the first and the second image. Although I uploaded both of them from the same large source jpg file using IMCE, the Image Toolkit settings are different. It turns out that Drupal's out of the box, standard compression quality setting (using php's GD2 image toolkit) is 75%.

The first one was scaled using the 75% setting and it gave me a bunch of ugly jpeg artifacts (especially in the red area), yuck!

The second (nice!) one was scaled using a 100% quality setting. Lovely! We end up with larger files, of course, but hey ... it isn't easy being this beautiful!

Cheers!