Noindex will take out the pages from the index of search engines. This will impact your traffic if your pages are already ranked.
As long as the category pages have different content, you will be fine. No need to remove them from the index unless you have specific requirement to do so.
For some reason, if you want only the first page to be ranked then go with the pagination hints which will consolidate your link value to the first page and most likely the first page will come up in the search result.
Note: Bing didn't officially endorse this practice and may be on its way.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
