Thank you tophand,

The CSS way is much more convenient and gives more flexibility.
Thanks for the idea, I even didn' know it could be there...

As of the Compression Quality - yes, already set up to 100 but the resized images are kind of soft, lacking sharpness which is important eye caching visual effect though I know oversharpening screws up the look.
So I am still in hunt for the sharpenning option in IH2 code calls to GD library.

Thanks