I believe the reason NASA sent the probe was not to take "1080p, full-color video footage", but rather prove something scientifically about life on Mars with other more suitable instruments. They couldn't care less about video footage. A shame really, but that is the main reason.
If they expect taxpayers to foot a $2.6B bill they need to give serious consideration to things which cause excitement and emotional resonance in same taxpayers. Having state-of-the-art resolution cameras (and audio microphone, in my opinion) in order to capture and transmit back a "you are there" experience should be a priority. If it were totally a privately-funded operation, then they can do whatever they want. I understand the desire to have rock-solid confidence in the overal system and it's components, thus testing-fest, thus analysis-fest, thus ultra-conservative instincts. But I'm sure there are ways to, say, isolate a "higher risk" component like a modern camera/microphone, and design for redundancy. And if you're going to spend $2.6B you might as well cough up an additional $100M, for example, if that's all it would take to put better, human emo-optimized sensors on there. Precisely because it takes so long and is so expensive anyway. So once it lands there and deploys, you can yield maximum ROI, including emotional/psychological ROI.
Anyway, if a NASA operation never gets around to doing such a thing, I bet if SpaceX puts a craft on Mars they'll have the philosophy where they could justify doing it.
And this is only a minor criticism on my part. I have massive appreciation for the NASA engineers and team, and what they just accomplished with the MSL landing. I think this issue is just one little blind spot it's easier for somebody outside their org to see and point out. They clearly nailed all the hardest bits of the mission, and "stuck" their EDL phase, even though it was so seemingly complex. Between SpaceX, the NASA Mars teams, and Planetary Resources, Armadillo Aerospace, etc. I feel these folks are taking us back to the historical trajectory we all thought we were on as kids. They're taking us back into the Space Age again, leaving the static doldrums of the Shuttle/ISS era.
When the design was finalized these cameras WERE pretty state of the art. Once something is finalized for a space mission it is very very hard to change it because everything else is designed around it.
