Nokia n8 photos max. 2 MB, why?

Question

Hi, my two days old Nokia N8 takes pictures with low quality. As it would be a white screen in front of the lense. But only on the photos, by focusing there is no problem with the picture. And the pictures are too small, I think: between 483 kb (!) -2,21 MB (of course I have 12 MB as default in the settings). Should I bring it back to the shop?

Answer 1

Although the native resolution of the sensor is 12 MPixels which should give at the very least 12MBytes files (and even 3 times more as color coding is 24 bits, but this is reduced by the Bayer color filtering system), the resulting file is compressed by the Jpeg method which leads to much lighter files.
It greatly depends of the image content. Large uniform areas in the pictures like blue sky or white snow support higher compression and the resulting files can be very small. It also depends on the amount of available light. Low light pictures need to be strongly processed to minimize high ISO noise which is done by rearranging or removing some high frequency and color informations. Less informations give smaller files too. The same if the lens is not perfectly focused or if the camera was shaking while taking the picture. Blurred images also contain less informations.
Now for the white halo. It seems to be caused by flare where some of the flash light reflecting on your finger is coming back to the lens (flare is a haze caused by a very bright light source shining into the lens but not in the image). It should happen only with flash photography and should be prevented by keeping your fingers away from the flash and lens assembly.