You're probably right. I was thinking more about manga when I mentioned picture quality, a lot of the scans you see are quite poor quality.
I've seen some bad quality anime too (to keep the file size down I guess) but generally I guess they're pretty good. If they weren't available to buy people would keep the quality high so there'd be no problem.
However I think reading anything from a book is better than from a computer screen so I'm far more concerned about manga cancellations (like patlabor and shadow star... but ironically I think these are two series for which scanlations aren't available, so not sure what that proves
)