NASA's Pricy Cameras Take Not So Great Pictures

This is what one of the cameras look like on the new NASA Curiosity that just landed on Mars. It is a custom built piece of hardware. In fact there are not one camera. But 17 in total. Some designed for microscopic photography, other designed for chemical analysis, and even others that will record 720p video and even 3D imagery.

But here is my question: With all of these camera lenses connected to one source designer for processing that data into an image, why on earth - at a cost of 2.5 billion dollars - does this 17 camera system only contain 8GB of memory?? Seriously?

Wow...

And with all of that smantsy Fantsy hardware, this was the best image they could send back...

Right...

No I am not kidding. Here is their page of images captured so far. But in all fairness, this was just used to confirm a landing on the planet surface. Let's hope we get better images than this. Because I am thinking a $200 point and shoot from Walmart could do a better job.