Two 25Kb images too large for 56k? (opinions please)

[Saberu]

I was having an argument with my friend about this because he seemed to think that filesize was too large, his justification being that users would quit the page instead of waiting 10 seconds for the images to load while reading the content.

I believe if the images were background images or banners he would have a point but the images are part of the content as they are photos. And I needed that level of detail in the images to explain them properly; aswell as thinking that what difference is a couple of seconds waiting (could have made them 15kb but would have been lossy) when the benefit is the image doesn't look nasty.

The website was for my WDD assignment and my tutor that demo'd it also said the images were too large and should have been 4Kb which is stupid because 4Kb images are either so lossy or so low res you can't see what things are.

Page in question- http://www.saberu.f2s.com/sport/badminton.html

 

[Saberu]

Thats using IE, Works fine in FF tho (isn't that a suprise)

Yeah I knew about that problem, only seems to happen when I put images in. Must be a bug in IE to do with CSS and image alignment as my CSS is w3c validated. Nice to see everyone agrees with me about the file size being ok, thought I was going crazy before

edit: I have an idea of what the bug is, i think because i've aligned the contents in a division tag to float left and then made the pictures inside that tag aligned center there is some formatting that IE doesn't know how to handle.