Ok.. first.. let's have some more fun with Adobe CS 3. Here's a low light shot with the A700 and CZ 16-80mm lens at 16mm wide open. It is purposely underexposed by 1 stop to capture the night atmosphere during the mid-autumn festival some time ago. This is an image take from my study room's window using version 4 firmware of A700

Top left - Adobe Camera Raw convert with focus on getting more details in this high contrast setting, colours a bit flatter but we get the most details from the dark shadows. Comes with NR.
Top right - Image Data Convertor with default settings, i.e. NR etc... most pleasing colours but the details suffer from poor NR and other limitations
Bottom left - Adobe Camera Raw convert with focus on getting the most pleasing image balance with details... No NR..
Bottom right - same as above but with noise reduction.

Crops below (not really 100% but close)

All the smoke from the sparklers causing a lot of problem for the NR algorithm for all 3 cases. Most pleasing will be the bottom left without NR. The smudge effect of NR is clear here.

Yeah.. this is fun...