I have a lot of pictures in my My Pictures directory and many located in specific folders that I use for desktop backgrounds. I dont think there is anything unusual about that and also that many of them are bmp images while the remainder are jpg images.
I know that bmp files are more or at least used to be native to Windows Operating systems in that they could be read and displayed faster but I have encountered an interesting dilemma. I have a new monitor with a native resolution of 1400 x 1050 pixels and I have a folder full of images that are 1024 x 768 which my old monitor used to be. So, I just stretch them and most of them look okay even though I can see some jagged edges on a lot of the images.
I was renaming some files one day and out of curiosity, I used the standard Windows Paint program to open one of these bmp files and convert/save it as a jpg file just to see what happens. I was thinking about doing some mass conversion because the jpgs seem to take up a lot less file space for the same picture. With a pic at the very same dimensions, changed from bmp to jpg, and an accompanying file size decrease of 1.50 MB to 68.2 KB, when I tried each of them as a desktop background, the jpg looked perfect while the original bmp had very pronounced stepped edges on the image when stretched to this monitor resolution.
So, why does the smaller, supposedly less detailed picture look so much better when stretched out to my monitor size? This doesnt seem to make any sense to me and makes me wonder if I should just convert all my bmps to jpgs. Is there any good reason to retain images as bmp files any more?
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