This all depends what we mean by “noise”.

a] noise has acquired the meaning for artefacts such as hiss, grain, pops crackles and clicks, and more recently the effect of  spatially stochastic multi-coloured “speckling” in dark areas of photographs.

This is caused by the random activity of the sensors — and the seemingly random levels of sampling at the low end of the ADC conversion used — being almost as great in magnitude as the actual image-stimulated activity in light sensors (ie, down in the low levels of the signal range, what we call the “noise floor”), and, having to be amplified up into usable levels, this brings up the random fluctuating activity along with it.

b] Anyone familiar with Shannon and Weaver, or specifically, Claude Shannon’s 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” would have a perhaps broader view of what we term as “noise” as being more along the lines of “anything that is received which was not as it was transmitted”. Thus, Distortion is viewed as noise. Deletion is noise. Generalisation is noise. All of it is not what was transmitted, therefore it is not signal, therefore it can be termed “noise”.

But that isn’t the accepted usage among the general public. For them, it is more akin to hiss, crackles, grain and speckles.

Again, if I was disrespectful, I'm truly sorry.

Thanks for the apology but don't worry about it - I'm fairly thick skinned and can also dish it out when I'm so inclined (although I would lay off the extra bold caps if I were you  )

I'm curious what you mean by 'noise comes from the manipulation of light' which is a fairly ambiguous statement. I would be interested to hear more.

Ian has hit a number of nails very squarely on the head - particularly when it comes to the influence of post-sensor amplification in the signal path.

Another aspect is what the 14-42 actually delivers to the sensor. When I was considering the E-P1 there were some pics on-line of a dismantled lens (which I can't track down now). These showed that, despite the girth of the barrel, the actual lens content was pretty small in relation to the other components crammed in there. Olympus PR boasts about the power of it's in-camera processing engine and, seeing that, I understood why.

Sorry, this got mangled:

My point isn't that the EP-L1 has more or less noise—the sensor is the same—just that the engineers at Olympus decided to suppress it more aggressively. This makes the noise appear lower in some instances, especially at lower ISOs, but also makes the shadows look blotchier and murkier. To my eye, they E-PL1 photos also have a slightly more "plastic"  look, a la Canon.

The reason I like using my E-P1 so much is not its resolution or freedom from noise—in these respects it can't touch the Nikon 300D I sold to get it—but how esthetically pleasing its photos can look. The way it handles noise reminds me of  shooting Tri-X. (And of course I love the colors.) I was ready to get the lighter, cheaper E-PL1, but the images look more conventionally digital, and therefore disappointing, to me. They just don't have the analog look of the E-P1/2, which reminds of the E-1 I had for years. Cameras are rather personal, aren't they?