Here’s the deal on the first (color) part of the cert:
1. At 400%, there’s no chromatic aberration.
2. Some characters/numbers appear to be tampered with (darker/lighter/outofregister)
3. The numbers and markings you have mentioned are very clear at this magniofication.
This is from blowing the thing up to 400% in adobe. I have stored the result here:
http://www.junipersec.com/images/cert3.tif
http://www.junipersec.com/images/cert4.tif
http://www.junipersec.com/images/cert5.tif
http://www.junipersec.com/images/cert6.tif
http://www.junipersec.com/images/cert10.tif
These are just cutouts, of course. Also, they’re stored as tiffs because, face it, jpg is not a format to use for this kind of thing -it’s compressed and loses a fair bit of data, which also means that if you try to blow it up furter you’re out of luck. Tif won’t lose anything and can be used by any good graphics program (and the google viewer).
Saving as tiff after jpg compression does not improve the image quality or remove the previous lossy jpg compression. And jpg is fine as long as the resolution is relatively high (in this case the same as the original) and the amount of compression low.