>Yes i did, compression doesn't effect the sharpness.
>
>>Have you tried quality=100?

This may not apply to your situation, but I found this on Microsoft's website. Perhaps testing it on an image that is 32x32 and seeing the result. (I know you are not rotating the image, but worth a shot)
If the width and height of the image are both multiples of 16, the process of rotating and saving the image causes no loss of information

Perhaps try it with the least compression (quality = 0) and see if that makes a difference.