Question about quality of ESRI World Topo

[caseywatkins]

Greetings All,

I'm using the ESRI World Topo as a base layer for a map on ArcMap 9.3 but the quality appears much different than it does with online mapping.
Has anybody else had this problem?

I'm only looking for quality at medium scale, simply to symbolize features on a large river system, but the world topo layer appears quite pixelated/out of focus kinda. Also, I opened the map through ArcGIS Online onto ArcGIS Desktop.

Any assistance will be greatly appreciated.

[MikeMinami]

As long as you're viewing the same data, the quality should be the same. Are you sure you're pointing to the same data? Make sure you're comparing the data at the same scale as well. ArcMap will resample the tiled images for scales in between the cached scale levels. You can force the scale of the map to match the nearest cached scale of any service in the map by right-clicking the layer and choosing 'Zoom To Nearest Cache Resolution'. 

Thanks,

Mike