Aha Nikon!

Wonderful Hubby has an inexpensive Nikon point and shoot that wasn't giving me a very good photo. I was irritated with it. I finally looked at the settings and took it off auto ISO and set the quality up to the max. While I am still not thrilled with the results, they are somewhat better.

If you have a choice, do not set the ISO up much past 800. And that's pushing it. 400 is pretty darned fast. If you set the ISO for 1600, you are going to have a much higher chance of getting a grainy photo.