Pic Size?

[SX2002]

Despite my D90 having 12+ MP, why is it that even on the max size and quality settings, my shots are no bigger than 6-7MP when taken?
I would have thught that with these settings my pics would be more in the 12MP range?

[I @ M]

SX, I think that you may be getting megapixels and megabytes mixed up.

Straight from the camera JPEG images would be typically around the 4 - 7 megabyte file size, if you are taking them in raw ( NEF ) format you can expect to see them between 14 - 20 megabytes and when converted to TIFF you generally end up with 60 - 70 megabyte images.

Megapixels and megabytes are related in file size in that the higher the megapixel count of a sensor, the higher the megabytes of information contained in the end image but they do not ( usually ) correspond as a 1:1 ratio between the two measurement formats.