Windows 7 converts wallpapers to jpg?

[Mr Winkle]

don't know if any of you have noticed, but if you have a nice lovely lossless image and set it as your desktop wallpaper, windows 7 will, in it's wisdom, convert it to a .jpg, spoiling any fine detail or gradients.

it seems you can manually specify a .bmp file in the registry and it will not convert the wallpaper image to a .jpg, but is there anyway this behavior can be disabled completely so one can use the gui to change wallpapers?

[mad_onion]

How did you apply the new wallpaper? Does it come out the same when you do it by adding the file/folder in control panel and select it from there and when you right click on a file and choose set as background. I think the two methods might produce different results.

[RvXtm]

I save the photo i want from photoshop to quality-12 jpg and apply it then.

[M_Lyons10]

I hadn't noticed this... I'm going to try this now...

[Sethos]

Vista did, if you right clicked on it and chose "Use as wallpaper" it would place it in a temporary folder and convert it to some dithered crap. You could get around that by opening the wallpaper settings and manually finding it, then it would use the original.

[Brandon Live Veteran]

JPEGs are used to reduce memory usage and start-up time. I think there are ways (perhaps via the CPL?) to set one without that happening though.