Downsampling and Lanczos

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If I'm not understanding it wrong, according to this Lanczos should generate good results for downscaling. However my tries and this shows that it does not. Why?

Can you recommend me a good way to downscale an image which would produces nice looking thumbnails. Should I use Area Interpolation? I there any other alternative in OpenCV?

cv2 resize with Lanczos4

cv2 resize with Area

And using PryDown first I've got a smoother result:

Code:

public static void Resize_PreserveAspectRatio(this Mat mat, Mat dst, int length, InterpolationFlags st = InterpolationFlags.Cubic, bool changeMaxLength = true)
        {
            double w = mat.Width;
            double h = mat.Height;

            double len2x = length * 2d;
            double div = changeMaxLength ? Math.Max(w, h) : Math.Min(w, h);
            if (div > len2x)
            {
                using (Mat mat1 = mat.Clone())
                {
                    while (div > len2x)
                    {
                        Cv2.PyrDown(mat1, mat1);
                        w = mat1.Width;
                        h = mat1.Height;
                        div = changeMaxLength ? Math.Max(w, h) : Math.Min(w, h);
                    }
                    double w1 = (w / div) * length;
                    double h1 = (h / div) * length;
                    Cv2.Resize(mat1, dst, new Size(w1, h1), 0d, 0d, st);
                }
            }
            else
            {
                double w1 = (w / div) * length;
                double h1 = (h / div) * length;
                Cv2.Resize(mat, dst, new Size(w1, h1), 0d, 0d, st);
            }
        }