Compression on NTFS uses modified LZ77 algorithm. It is very fast but not always effective.
It works pretty well for files/documents containing a number of repeating sequences of symbols. Examples of such file types: text files, RTF, BMP, HTML files, etc.
For other file types, such as binaries, GIF, JPG, ZIP files, etc. this compression algorithm is not useful so that these files might not be compressed at all.