Having experience with both Sony VX2K/PD & Canon A1, I feel that both camera's behave quite different.

With the Sony I had the habit to maintain a more underexposed mode (then f.i. the Auto modes ever would do), resulting in excellent detail, somewhat filmic colours and surely an acceptable noise level.

The Canon has a completely other behavior. It clearly needs the driven into a more explicit exposure to achieve an acceptable noise level in the image, certainly in the dark area's - but by doing this, it remains to my feeling somewhat more stable in the resulting detail & colours over the exposure range.

I can imagine that the signal treatment in the Canon is a little more advanced and solid then the Sony VX ever was - which is after all a design of quite a few years ago. Probably the new Sony's FX1/7 and V1 behave as different as the A1, but I have no in depth experience with this.

Steven, it could be that in some images the NR is on. In the shot I went twice through the 18 presets that I found here. But between each preset I go the default setting (which is at the moment the low light setting which has some NR (it's default since the first days I only shot at low light))

It could also be the compression of the Web files.

A great way to illustrate exposure and noise is to do what I did at Christmas. Put the cam in auto mode, including auto gain and start chasing a 3 year old around. With the cam stabilized, I was jetting around from low light to very good light. The effect on noise was profound in the recorded footage. The noise "melted away" as I approached well lit areas, and returned (as expected) in very low lit areas. Although grainy, I was surprised I got any footage at all in some of the nearly dark areas.

I spent some time yesterday with the A1 hooked up to a Dell Ultrasharp 24" LCD (2407FPW) via component HD, and started playing with presets. This is a great way to tweak settings as the 1920x1200 monitor does a good job highlighting subtle differences in noise, contrast, noise reduction settings etc. A few hours like would be very productive in looking at the preset differences, and seeing immediately how they change the A1's image.

I have removed the clips from my site since they were eating bandwidth.
Also since the problem is solved I deemed it unnecessary to keep them online :)

Software for removing noise
 

Having dealt with this issue with still camera quite a bit, the best solution I have seen is now available for video cameras (www.neatimage.com). I have not tried it though. I would be curious to see it anyone has used it and if they like the results. It sure works wonders in 'still land' though.

cheers dave