It is entirely possible I'm afraid and the extra noise will be covered up by very aggressive in camera noise reduction. This will be somewhat offset by the fact that there are more pixels, so for viewing the images at a given size you will effectively be zoomed out more from the higher res image.

I am still waiting for one of the manufacturers of consumer compacts to be brave enough to drop back down to 5 or 6 million pixels and focus on making bigger sensors. I can't see it ever happening though.

The Sigma DP1 is interesting, but it needs some more competition.