I don't understand you much but. You mean that all the cameras generates patterns like this and my camera noise generator is generating a plain texture?
I don't know if that pattern is fix or random. The camera always had this glitch, with the battery fully charged and flat.
I have few theories: 1- There's something wrong with the sensor or the sensor codifier, maybe the design skip some components to make it cheaper. 2- There's not any noise generator for save few CPU cycles. 3- There's something wrong with the noise generator and it's generating this.
The "random" generator does not have to be truly random at all, it just should not generate regular patterns.
Definitely it wont be any HW defect at all, as those would cause the processor to go mad first, so becoming unable to take any picture at all.
The reason could be either lousy SW engineering (setting wrong parameters for the given pixel counts) or indeed an attempt to save some power by using simpler, less computing demanding algorithm.
But what puzzles me: These dithering effects are usually make sense only on the reproduction (display) end of the chain (the used panel has limited color resolution). They are completely useless when the limitation is the sensor ADC or so (as you have to have the fine resolution image first), so I dont see how it should be affecting the recorded image.
Maybe some dithering magic is in the ADC, but then it could work only in 1-D (accumulating the rounding errors along the stream of processed pixels), but the restriction to 1-D means it would become very visible way before it has any chance to bring any benefit (boost the apparent color depth with limited native sensor depth). But maybe it is exactly that...