These are some 100% crops of ISO speed comparison tests illustrating the noise as the ISO speed increases for the Konica Minolta A2 and the Sony F717. All tests were taken tripod mounted, with a zoom of approximately 90mm and taken at f/5.6. Pictures were taken using the highest quality JPEG mode of each camera. Exposures were fairly long, around 3.2 seconds for the ISO 64 pictures and correspondingly shorter as the ISO speed was increased.
I was pleasantly surprised that the Minolta A2 had a bearable amount of noise at ISO 64, 100, and 200. At ISO 400, noise became very noticeable, and at ISO 800 it became extremely noticeable. Colors on the A2 were more accurate than the F717 in this test (both cameras were set to use Tungsten white balancing). Also, the Sony F717 pictures were scaled up to 8 megapixels using bicubic interpolation in order to make the image sizes equivalent. Another interesting thing that this test shows is that the Minolta A2 has a slight edge in sharpness and detail over the Sony F717 due to the extra megapixels.
Minolta A2, ISO 64
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Minolta A2, ISO 100
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Sony F717, ISO 100
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Minolta A2, ISO 200
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Sony F717, ISO 200
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Minolta A2, ISO 400
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Sony F717, ISO 400
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Minolta A2, ISO 800
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Sony F717, ISO 800
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Minolta A2, ISO 64, sharpened in-camera
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The final crop shows the Minolta A2 picture taken at ISO 64, with in-camera sharpening turned on (set to Hard). This does indeed seem to yield a sharper image from the camera, though noise is ever-so-slightly more noticeable than the ISO 64 picture without hard sharpening at the top. Minolta only has three sharpening levels: Soft, Normal, and Hard. I only wish they had a few more sharpening levels.