It's imaging hardware likely from 2001 or older. Remember this space craft has been in flight for almost 10 years, in development for several years before that and the imaging hardware needs to be well tested and hardened for space flight.
Even if it was today's hardware, we'd still be getting grainy images from this distance. It might be slightly better, but not the amazing hi-res images people on this thread seem to be expecting. Pluto is really small and far away. It's just a tiny spot even to Hubble.
Well get the hi-res images once new horizons actually does its flyby and once the data is downloaded.
There's one person in this thread who is disappointed. Everyone else seems to recognise this as the amazing thing it is.
Perhaps we just need some kind of infographic? If the camera is a single pixel, how many pixels away is Pluto? What's the equivalent using (as one person suggested) a iPhone camera?
LORRI, the camera taking these photographs has a resolution of 4.9 µradians per pixel. From what I can put together, the iPhone 6 has a horizontal resolution of about 340 µradians per pixel. So a 70-pixel-across image of pluto from LORRI (about what we have here[1] taken about two days ago) would appear to be a single pixel on an iPhone 6.
It's possible that single pixel wouldn't show up at all since it's pretty dim all the way out there, but Apple has been working hard on their low-light image capture :)
And that's of course not accounting for radiation protection, a very carefully designed CCD and mounting so you can actually do science with the results, calibration after riding up on a rocket, sensitivity across 350nm to 850nm, etc.
