You’re a smart guy, figure it out!

It bothered me for quite some time: I take a lot of screenshots to paste into emails/documents and when it is a screenshot of code block I like to add borders to that image to give it dimensions. In Word / Outlook 2003 it worked as expected keeping contents of the image as sharp as text, but…

• Word 2007 — makes picture a bit blurry when adding a border. Works as I would expect it to work if you save in DOC compatibility mode
• Outlook 2007 — makes pasted picture a bit blurry even without adding border (I tried all the options under Paste Special with the same result)

On the left is DOCX with the same image pasted twice and then I added border to the top image. On the right is the DOCX saved as DOC — as soon as I saved it into DOC format, image became clear again. Bizarre…

2010/03/09 Update:

After receiving a comment from Jerseydude I wanted to make sure that zoom is not the culprit and by accident figured out what is causing this: it is NOT the zoom, it is the width of the border… what’s even more strange is that I don’t understand the logic:

• 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, 2.75, 3, 3.25pt are the ONLY ones that maintain clear view.
• All others that i tried (from .25 to 4) produce fuzzy