Here in this thread we'll cover every phone except maybe those funny things with a wheel. Cellphones, DECT phones, satellite phones... Slightly outdated trunking radio phones...
Military radiophones. NASA/ISS "phones". Skype-like apps... 

So, what sort of a phone have you had/do you have? Brand?

Perhaps the JPEG quality or resolution defaults to low (the output is only 1.6 MB)

Resolution is set to 16:9 (16Mpix). The only alternative is 4:3 (13Mpix).

This is kind of odd because in Android apps the max res is 5984 x 339x (187:106, 20.3 MP).

There are no JPEG quality settings in the Sailfish photo app, nor an option for RAW.

A lack of settings can certainly be defended to some degree. Is there any point to being able to select 160 x 120? Or really almost any of the lower settings? Presumably those modes are there to save apps like Skype some processing power when they have to limit the resolution to something like 1280 x 720 for bandwidth reasons but they really have no place in photos. My SE T630 took pictures in 320x200 (or some such). I haven't the slightest desire to replicate that. Curious sidenote, my Zenfone 2 offers 2M as the lowest option, which is basically the smallest resolution that isn't completely hopeless.^[1]

By contrast, there's certainly something to be said for recording in 720p or perhaps even lower if you don't need higher quality video.

Anyway, conclusion being that regardless whether you use RAW, the results show that you require an Android photo app because the stock Sailfish one is worthless. Luckily Open Camera and FreeDCam are pretty decent, probably others as well.

¹ A good camera can do quite well with 4 MP, for example. I've got an old Konica Minolta 6 MP DSLR here; excellent quality. The difference is that all 6 megapixels are stock full of information, while the "20" megapixels on my XA2 are largely noise.↵