Allow me to share my struggle with some of their inconsistent remarks here (hope I have the permission to quote). I am sure I didn't make a mistake going against the intent of the review.
"If you judge cameras purely on graphs and figures, the TZ1 would be a real winner - measurable luminance noise in particular is very low indeed at higher ISO settings. Of course the truth is that this is all noise reduction, which starts fairly high and gets stronger - the TZ1 has lower measurable chroma noise at ISO 400 than it goes at ISO 200; a sure sign that the noise reduction system is really 'kicking in'. So then, we've got very clean results at ISO 80-400, but results where the effect of noise reduction has a gradually more destructive effect on fine detail - particularly low-contrast detail (hair, foliage etc).
You can also see noise even in ISO 80 shots, particularly in the shadows."
"The difference between the Pentax *ist DS and Nikon D50 is pretty clear here especially at ISO 400 and 800 where the D50 continues to deliver clean tones the *ist DS is already looking speckled and somewhat noisy. Additionally there's no loss of detail in the D50 images which hints to either a
very good noise reduction system or minimal noise reduction.
The graph below supports what we've seen in visual comparison, the D50 delivering low luminance noise levels especially between ISO 200 and 800. At ISO 1600 noise levels are similar to the Canon EOS 350D and Nikon D70 although with no obvious loss of detail. As mentioned above the D50's noise is most noticeable in the red channel (luminance is mostly made up of green)."
"Indicated ISO sensitivity is on the horizontal axis of this graph, standard deviation of luminosity is on the vertical axis.
Measurable noise is unsurprisingly very similar at ISO 80-400 to the other cameras we've tested using this chip, and though it's offering nowhere near the performance of the Fuji Super CCD sensor (as used in the F10/F11) at ISO 800,
it's a lot better than many cameras of this type. Luminance and chroma noise are low at ISO 80 and 100, producing very clean results without excessive noise reduction."
ExplorerZ said:
erm... noise will somewhat only appear at ISO200 or above. Plus all this pic have been greatly resized thus you will not really see much of the noise.
at this size i can easily shoot with my d50 at iso1600 and still looks pretty much noiseless
