That really does look awful, pekische. There is a noticeable checkerboard pattern going on there even in the COMMAND OPS 2 patch. That ain't right.
I'm running the game on a 24" 1920x1200 resolution monitor and those start up images look fine on my system. While you didn't give us any specs for your system we have nothing to compare it to and even if you did it might be hard to diagnose what the problem is other then to say you should be running the game at your monitors native resolution with updated video drivers for your video card.
Also, every time a photo is processed, it's quality will be reduced if you're using a lossy file format. gif and jpg are notorious for that. Consider too how and where Dave got these images, what kind of film they were shot on, along with how many times they have been processed. A lot of the old black and white film originally had a ton of grain and putting that image on a super sized monitor just exaggerates it.
Sorry can't be more helpful.