Some cameras exhibit almost no noise and some a lot and all the time.
See also artifacts . There are several techniques for cleaning a noisy image, and several products which have been developed to specifically perform this task. Check out Quantum Mechanics by Camera Bits and the noise filter in QImage Pro by Michael Chaney. The crops below are taken from my Canon EOS-D30 review , they show that there's almost no visible noise at ISO 100, but at ISO 1600 there's a fair amount of visible noise in the image. Olympus expands Camedia range Polaroid to lay off 2,000 employees Kodak Pro DCS 720x Zing.