Why is my new 10 MP camera only providing images at 2 MB?

Something else… possibly. I would reformat the SD card to the cameras standards. I have a Cannon Powershot & from within the menu on the camera, you can choose to format an SD card, I would do so first, before changing other settings.

I’m a huge Canon PowerShot fanboy, so I’m really curious about this, especially since I was thinking of getting the S90 to replace my SX 110.

You pressed FUNC SET and it’s set on “L”? That should work…

How do you know it’s taking the pictures in 2 MP?

@DominicX This may seem naive, but mainly it is because the jpeg files when downloaded are in the 2 MB range, which seems rather small for a 10MP camera unless the built in image compression is extreme (and yes, it is set to the highest setting).

@shilolo

You have to check the size of the image to be sure. I have images from my 12 MP Canon camera and the size ranges from about 3–5 MB (and that’s with the “Superfine” setting).

The size of a 12 MP picture is about 4000×3000 pixels.

There is the reason (I believe) they are jpegs… is there a setting in which they can stay in the .raw format… jpeg compression is such a killer in the world of photography. Take a picture & open it up with your program of choice…check it’s resolution. If it’s what @DominicX said, then you are fine in terms of MP. But in terms of quality & compression… stay far, far away from jpeg. :)

@rpmpseudonym The beauty of this particular camera is that it can shoot in both RAW and JPEG. As a matter of convenience (and quite frankly, time), I generally prefer JPEG since I am not highly likely to manipulate RAW files (I just don’t have the time).

I shoot at 8 MP and my JPEGs clock in at around 1.5MB (give or take). When I crank it down to 5 MP then I get around 1.2 MB so it sounds to me like you are in the right ballpark for a JPEG.

@rpmpseudonym It really depends, but the way I see it, if you are that fussy then you should probably stick with film anyways. Then again, I find that those who insist on RAW over JPEG often eschew CDs in favor of vinyl records.
A properly configured camera shooting JPEGs can make a print that you can’t really tell the difference until you get well into poster-sized enlargements (and I don’t mean a mere 20“x30”) or try to read the tag on somebody’s shirt from 50 feet away, at which point the CCD is often more of a limitation than the JPEG format.
If you are silly enough to leave the quality lower than the best (turn compression up) then odds are that you would screw up the settings on any type of camera anyways, thus rendering it all moot since you aren’t likely to take a good picture anyways.

Remember that unless you are saving images in RAW form, the JPG compression will avoid storing repeated pixels of identical colour and brightness separately. That is how compression works! That makes for smaller files.