With antialiasing the pure dmnd version does indeed look better to me, which is funny, as in games i hate anti-aliasing and love my little discrete pixels.
Now there's a second weird issue: I can't actually see any differences between 1 and 2. Maybe my vision is not good enough, or my Samsung 245B+ has too much DPI for where i'm sitting at, but i honestly can't tell a difference in that image. With the Z-machine image the difference is extremely visual though. Maybe that would be a better front page example?