Actually after playing A77 for 2 days, i find the noise control quite decent. The trick is to turn off DRO and not to turn up too high saturation, use vivid mode seems to also improve a bit, esp the shadows area where the "std" profile seems to brighten up shadow areas therefore increasing noise level.
Up till iso1600, its quite on par with 5N, D7000, A580, G3 (yes its the m4/3 G3, i am surprised its performing similar). At iso3200, its still quite on par with 60D but looks a little noisier than the 4 cameras as above (yes, somehow the noise handling of G3 seems nicer looking, kudos to panny new sensor and jpeg processor).
But all the above are observed when i pixel peep at 100% crop with my nose ard 15cm from my pc screen. If you look at normal viewing distance and size, its not distinguishable from all cameras till iso6400.
Nex7 without the pellicle mirror should perform slightly better, but again only noticeable if u pixel peep.
However one thing to point out, i took the A77 out during lunch today to changi village, the colors are stunning even on a cloudy day today.
Btw saw from SAR that sony is coming out fw2.0 soon, so i guess sony is really working real hard to get this king working at its full potential.
