the best codecs are not included by default. Go to
www.3ivx.com and download and install that. Then from iMovie in the expert export set the quality to 85% or so, and the bitrate to 1000 (1 MB/s).
the other problem I imagine for you is interlacing. DV (the codec used by iMovie) is always interlaced (as far as I know), and when you export from it without deinterlacing, you get combing and blurring and it just looks generally bad. iMovie doesn't have a deinterlacer (as far as I know), so the only way I can imagine people using it to make movies for quicktime is to export back to DV (which will retain true interlacing if you're lucky, instead of creating a new interlaced movie with the interlacing artifacts of the old one burned in) or cutting it to half height, which eliminates every other field, so should look good if you don't compare to the original side by side.
if you want to deinterlace, the best (and priciest, and slowest) option is terran's Cleaner (formerly Media Cleaner). Other (free) options I know of but can't vouch for quality are OpenShiiva and MediaPipe. QuickTime Pro can just ignore every other field and export without interlacing, but that just loses half the vertical resolution and scales it back up to normal size. All of these take QuickTime compatible files as input.
but I don't use iMovie much, and maybe they solved the interlacing issue since the last time I used it. But iMovie's purpose is editing, with the expectation that you'll be putting it back on tape at the end. Saving to quicktime was an afterthought, and as such, iMovie knows little of compression and the issues surrounding it
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