There was another guy who had this issue but the solution was never posted...
I installed the Express trial version on this machine: Win7 16gb RAM 500gb drive (service pack and MS dotNET stuff all installed etc). This machine makes nice clear 1920x1080 mp4 videos (YouTube codec) w/ an open source editor. So it can handle moderate video processing jobs. It has an Intel graphics card w/ updated driver.
But this pc is hitting some sort of threshold in Express (vram)?... Smaller imported png or jpg image single files (no batches) make it to the canvas at the original resolution and clarity. But imported png/jpg files above a certain dimension (seems to be 1000-1200 pixels) get compressed and resized smaller with poor resolution. Right click on image for info and each time the image has come in at about 70% of original size, poor quality. Aspect ratio setting doesn't seem to matter.
I'm importing simple graphic art png images 24bit from Adobe Illustrator. No photos. Some have 1500px dimension but are only 300kb file size or less. Just a single image in the project. The Express composition settings are at 100% scale and preview viewer quality is not the issue. The final output mp4 is low res also.
I have uninstalled/reinstalled with no improvement. I like Express but I need a fix for this issue in order to buy. I have the two RAM allotments cranked at 10gb and 5gb in settings btw. I have unchecked video smoothing etc. I have experimented w/ larger canvas size etc.
Thanks for any help!