Help with Sony Cybershot T77

My husband bought me a Sony Cybershot T77 for Christmas. I love the look and size of the camera. The problem that I have is the inconsistent quality of the pictures. I find that about 60% of my pictures are grainy or blurred. They lack the crispness that I would expect from a quality camera. I have the camera set pretty much to Auto - is this my mistake? Should I do my settings more manually? I really wanted to use the camera as a point and shoot camera, so don't want to be messing around with settings all the time. My husband has a SLR for those kind of shots. Would appreciate some advice.

From the sounds of it, the graininess is likely a result of a high ISO setting, while the blurr is likely caused by a slow shutter speed. With out seeing examples of the pictures it is difficult diagnose, but this would likely be the problem.

Auto mode is constantly adjusting the settings to try to capture best image possible. Unfortunately, this doesn't always produce the kind of picture we want.

My suspicion is that this occurs under low light conditions. The auto mode is trying to capture the image as best it can, so it cranks up the ISO (the sensors sensitivity to light) which produces a more grainy picture. If it is still too dark, the auto mode is going to adjust the shutter speed to stay open longer (to let in more light) when when it does this, any camera shake gets captured in the picture. The aperture (f-stop) also have an affect on the amount of light let in and the depth of field (DoF) which can affect how much of your picture (background/foreground) is in focus.

If you want to learn about how the shutter speed, aperture, and ISO settings affect how a picture is taken, check out this site. (www.dryreading.com/camera/index.html). It let's you play around with the settings on a virtual camera and see what the impact is on the resulting picture.

I would recommend uploading some pictures so we can see exactly what we are dealing with.

Hope it is some help,