I see Dave has added to the article..

http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/AA700/AA700IMAGING.HTM

From the site:

I have to admit that the results above were a bit of a shock. At low ISOs, Adobe Camera Raw blows away the in-camera JPEGs, but at high ISOs, it's entirely the other way around. Thinking that I was just getting too aggressive with the noise reduction controls in ACR, I processed the ISO 6400 file with both luminance and chroma noise sliders set to zero. As you can see from the results, the detail loss is still pretty horrific.

Some readers have reported that this is a known behavior of ACR with CMOS sensors. I haven't studied the issue to know whether that's true or not, but it's apparent from the crops above that there's some pretty extensive noise processing going on somewhere, outside the control of ACR's noise reduction sliders.

At the time of its announcement, Sony touted the fact that the A700 was doing noise reduction on the raw image data, before it was written to the RAW format. I'm hoping that what we're seeing above is simply a matter of not being able to fully disable the anti-noise processing in ACR, and not a result of NR that's being done in-camera prior to the RAW file being written. If the latter is the case, it really defeats the purpose of a RAW file, and would mean that the detail would be forever lost to post-processing.

There's always a question of what's really in a RAW file, as there always has to be at least some processing done to convert it for viewing on an RGB display. In an attempt to get at least one more data point for what's going on in the A700's RAW files at high ISO, I converted a file in Sony's own Image Data Converter, with the noise-reduction processing option turned off. The results can be seen in the bottom right crop in the table above, and seem to support the idea that the noise reduction (and detail loss) is indeed present in the RAW files themselves.

I'll try to come back and report on this more, once Bibble gets its translator done, I get a copy of Capture One able to read the A700's files, or I hear more from Sony about the A700's RAW-mode NR.
--
http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c25/barryfitzgerald/Test%20shots/rs.jpg

Clint is on holiday! Soon to return! ;-)