I ask anyone with Windows 7/8 to do a test. On your Windows 7 computer browse to C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper\Windows and grab img0.jpeg which is the default windows 7 wallpaper that I've used in my posts above. Set this as your wallpaper in Windows 8 and tell me how the quality is (look around the windows logo especially for artifacts and quality reduction)
Well here I go:
-laptop GFX: Intel 4000
-native resolution: 1366x768
img0.jpg on desktop (fill mode)
Took just the center so you can see.
What do you think? There is some heavy blur on red and yellow but looks OK to me (
it's a normal procedure applied here, I don't think PNG will do better because it still has to resize to 1366x768).
But you were right: looks bad... compared to original.
Well, I'm affected as well but didn't payed attention to it.
Because desktop is full with icons, pretty messy.
Still weird compared to Win7 but logically:
You get a blur because the size is not native (wallpaper has 1920x1200). The blur has more affect on red and yellow so it appears.
The same thing is seen in your picture as well.
As a conclusion I can say that this is not the fault of JPG compression but the theme applier which has to fill or fit the image on screen.
It is also not due to the monitor so I can stop wasting time giving you guys color profiles. Sorry for that.
(Since you can print screen the lags means is not the monitor but the actual scaling on the desktop).
In other words the image from Windows (img01) is easily explained: 1920x1200 is not 16/9 HD or 1080p.
By one or another fill modes it will blur it on another resolution.
Therefore I suggest you try this:
Don't mind the preview, it's good quality.
It's NOT scaled.
It's cropped to 1080p, should provide best quality on native HD screen. It is JPG alright so you can see it's not due to the compression (99% in this case).
For Stefan's picture, there is a bit harder to understand the lags there because I don't know the image's native resolution but with one or another trick, JPG should do fine as well. Cropping that to (1050p) native should give best results indeed. I use GIMP for this but other tools like Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro can do the trick as well.
In my opinion you don't need to replace JPG with PNG, you just need to remove the rescaling/resizing.
This issue It seems to happen all the time and on bigger monitors with higher resolutions it looks worse.
But the question still remains: why in Win7 it looked better (at least for you guys)?
Does Win8 use different codecs for images?
Do probably newer image codecs need updates?
Do our eyes need replacement?
We'll see... In the meantime, just crop the images if they look annoying.
Cheers
Hopachi