Why is my iPhone memory so low?

The camera roll on my iPhone 4S only has 26 photos and 20 videos. None of the photos are HD, and the videos are as short as 7 seconds, as long as 3 minutes, and average less than a minute each… But in Settings>General>Usage, it's telling me that my camera roll is taking up THREE GIGS.

On top of that, I added up all of the megabytes in my 42 apps, and it totals no more than 2.1 gigs total. I have no music, no videos, no audiobooks, no podcasts, no voice memos, nothing in my newsstand, etc. My email is set to keep only the last 50 messages. I have maybe a few dozen contacts, nothing excessive. I've deleted all my history in Safari. I have no reminders, I never use my calendar, so it's empty… All of this, but my iPhone still says that I've used 11.3 GB, and that I only have 2.2 gigs remaining. WHY? What am I not thinking of? Where else could this memory be going, and how to I check/delete it?

Any and all suggestions are GREATLY appreciated!

The videos are in fact HD, as that is what the phone records in, and there's no way to change this. Depending on what kind of apps you have, some use your phone memory to store information regarding it, but usually not very much. Try backing up your data and doing a software restore, it kind of sounds like there's something wrong with your phone.

Because the phone says 16 gigs but you only really get 12-14

and on top of that the phone needs about 2 gigs for the operating system and software

memory is a disadvatage of an iphone

It's clearly the videos.

The iPhone4S records 1080p HD video; five minutes of video takes about 1 gigabyte, so the fact that your camera roll is taking up 3 gigabytes makes perfect sense. The still photos are nominal, they are probably taking up less than 100MB of storage space.

My guess is that you have other videos elsewhere on your device, not in the camera roll (perhaps an album or a third-party video player app, etc.). You should look very carefully at Settings > General > Usage > Storage.

If you can't identify where all your storage is going, I suggest you contact Apple Technical Support for further assistance.

You should consider uploading some or all of your videos to a cloud-based service like YouTube, Flickr, or Vimeo, and delete them from your device. Note that you can easily mark the videos as private, so only you can stream them to your device. Of course, if the content type violates the cloud service's terms of use, you'll simply need to keep them on your device.

In the future, you should consider purchasing a larger capacity device since clearly your specific usage case requires more storage.