Imagemagick producing poor quality thumbnails - php

Question

Well, just noticed my imagick is producing blurry / poor quality thumbnails. Couldn't find a piece of code that I need to correct in order to make thumbs better quality. Any suggestions? It all happens in a PHP function below. Also 2 image samples are below as well.
try {
$image = new Imagick($picfile);
if ($image->getImageColorspace() == \Imagick::COLORSPACE_CMYK) {
$image->transformimagecolorspace(\Imagick::COLORSPACE_SRGB);
}
Imagick::setResourceLimit (6, 1);
// hypothetical new h and w
$new_w = round($o_height * $maxwidth / $maxheight);
$new_h = round($o_width * $maxheight / $maxwidth);
$ratio=round(($o_width/$o_height), 2);
if($ratio < 1.25){$go_vertical=true;}
if($o_width > $o_height && !$go_vertical){ // horizontal
$image->cropThumbnailImage($maxwidth, $maxheight);
$image->writeImage($path); $pathe=1;
}
if($o_width <= $o_height || $go_vertical){ // vertical
$image2 = new Imagick();
$image2->newImage($new_w, $o_height+2, "white");
$x = round(abs(($new_w - $o_width) / 2))-1;
echo $mode." x=".$x." IMAGE (".$new_w.", ".$o_height.")<br />";
$image2->compositeImage($image, imagick::COMPOSITE_DEFAULT, $x, 0);
$image2->cropThumbnailImage($maxwidth, $maxheight);
// Strip out unneeded meta data
$image->stripImage();
$image2->writeImage($path);
$image2->destroy(); $pathe=2;
}
$image->destroy();
As images do not directly insereted here, here are links:
Good example: https://www.comfyco.com/temp/b/good.jpg
Bad example: https://www.comfyco.com/temp/b/bad.jpg
It doesn't look drastically different here but on actual website it's pretty bad sometimes. Any advice what parameter / line to add to make those thumbnails look better?
Thanks!