When I render interactively in the RenderView using a ROP, the texture detail in my image is tack sharp.

When I “Render to Disk” to disk via the button on the same ROP, the resulting exr image is a noticeably blurry.

When I save the interactive image out from RenderView to exr, it is sharper than the “Render to Disk” method, but still not as 100% sharp as the image I see in the Render View.

I've tried viewing the image in mplay and Nuke and am getting the same results.

Are there some settings I can adjust on the ROP to increase the quality of the exr's being output?

The IPR doesn't do any pixel filtering, that's why it appears “sharper”. The final render uses the pixel filtering as noted in the manuel:
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.5/nodes/out/ifd#output [sidefx.com]
You can try a different filter method to get a sharper look (Sinc for example).

Thanks goafreak.

I also did some experimenting with the options using the “Save Frame…” option via the RMB menu in RenderView … and a contributing factor appears to be the ZIP compression of exr files.

I tried switching to no compression and got a crisp image, however an HD resolution frame went from 450KB to 32MB in size.

frez
Thanks goafreak.

I also did some experimenting with the options using the “Save Frame…” option via the RMB menu in RenderView … and a contributing factor appears to be the ZIP compression of exr files.

I tried switching to no compression and got a crisp image, however an HD resolution frame went from 450KB to 32MB in size.

The ZIP compression is lossless, therefore it should not have any impact on the image quality!