Animation quality is better with matshow() than with imshow(). How to improve it?
The issue is due to interpolation.
Matplotlib matshow is a wrapper for imshow, in that it "sets origin to ‘upper’, ‘interpolation’ to ‘nearest’ and ‘aspect’ to equal."
So while matshow always uses interpolation="nearest", imshow by default has interpolation=None. Note that this is different from interpolation="none".
interpolation=Noneuses the interpolation set in theimage.interpolationvariable from the matplotlib rc file (which can be different in different matplotlib versions.)interpolation="none"uses no interpolation, same as"nearest"
The safest way to overcome this problem is to specifically set an interpolation method in both calls
plt.matshow(array, interpolation="none")plt.imshow(array, interpolation="none")