The two images are slightly magnified identical-sized small crops of a 40D JPG and a 450D JPG at ISO 1600 viewed side-by-side in Survey mode in Lightroom 2.0. The screen capture was saved with FSCapture at 100% JPG Quality. Compare noise in areas of similar brightness. This is just a rough comparison because the camera contrast and sharpening parameters, temperature, exposure length and any number of other things are different, but it is still useful to see the noise is the same order of magnitude. The 40D image crop comes from the Impress Japan ISO 1600 harbor view: http://dc.watch.impress.co.jp/cda/static/image/2007/08/24/img_0016.jpg Article (in Japanese): http://dc.watch.impress.co.jp/cda/review/2007/08/24/6904.html The second image is a crop from the boxer near the end of DPReview's 450D Preview image set, after applying some WB-eyedropper color-correction in LR2 but no other processing: http://dpreview-img.fotki.com/gallery/canoneos450d_preview/originals/img_0191.jpg Gallery page: http://www.dpreview.com/news/0803/08032101canon450dgallery.asp