The Engadget site takes a look at the unboxed D5000.

It doesn’t really say much, but take a look at how the screen can be articulated.

PhotographyBlog has a quick hands-on review here and dpReview also has a general overview (the same stuff you find in the press release) and sample images.

You guys in Beverly Hills will just have to find another camera store- Ritz is closing 300 stores, unless you’re in need of some retail shelving and counters:

Retail inventory valued at more than $50 million will be liquidated at the stores that are being closed. Store closing sales offering substantial discounts on all inventory at those locations will begin on Saturday, April 4, and are expected to continue until everything is sold to the bare walls.

If you’d like the list of closing stores, you can get it here. California appears to be hit large, mainly in the beach towns, 2/4 locations in my area are going down, Florida looks like it’s getting hit hard, Minnesota has a high count, and Texas also has a large number going down.

As I’ve written before, I shed no tears.

PMA 2009 Dead Nikon Rumors

You don’t mind if I engage in a little childish pointing and laughing, do you?

There were lots of sites predicting lots of Nikon goodies to be announced at PMA 2009.

The biggest ones were:

• D700x
• D770
• D400
• D5000

Then we had a wad of lenses supposedly coming:

• Nikkor AF-S VR-II 200mm f1.8D
• Nikkor AF-S VR-II 300mm f2D
• Nikkor AF-S VR-II 400mm f2.5D
• Nikkor AF-S VR-II 70-200mm f2.5D

Quotes from various well-known sites:

“…potential release of the D700x next week, but I think those are just opinions of famous online personalities. I have not received a single tip for D700x and I will stay with my previous selection: D5000 + D400 (the D400 may be released after PMA, but before July 2009). At that point I will have to drop the D5000 next week release probability to 75% – so far I have received info from only one source.”

I believe that I saw a quote that put this same site saying that the D5000 was a 95% chance.

Another site with a much better reputation wrote:

It is almost a certainty that we will see new lenses from Nikon at PMA.

So why am I pointing this out other than to toot my own horn? To remind you that this site is a service to you- dedicated to trying to figure out what Nikon’s doing- that doesn’t mean repeated every stupid, idiotic rumor that I can find- that’s just pointless- just reporting on some of them

If something’s just unlikely to be true, at worst, I’ll point it out and call it unlikely, but a lot of times, I will just pass.

Nikon PMA 2009 - Wet Matches

Basically nothing, nada, zip.

A 50 years of F-mount logo and some PR blather about the 35mm DX.

Ah well. My digital F3 will have to wait, I guess.

Nikon Japan- Price-hike April 17th

Zachary on dpReview reports that the Japanese are seeing their prices raised too:

There have been lots of threads recently about Nikon price increases, and people have blamed exchange rates. Now, however, there are Nikon price increases in Japan, too. I went to my local camera store here in Kyoto today and there were signs up saying all new Nikon products would become more expensive on April 17. When I asked, they said they had been informed by Nikon this was the case.

Well this is pretty strange actually, I’m better Nikon will see even worse losses next quarter- raising prices right now is probably not a winning strategy.

Guess we’ll find out. Beyond their quarterly filings- when we start seeing pricing gimmicks like mail-in or instant rebates, you can take that as a sign that they know they’ve priced things too high and are hurting more than they expected.

Nikon Non-Bayer Sensor Patent

Anonymous points me to another article by the same guy who found the last patent.

The patent details a non-Bayer sensor which dispenses with the second green pixel in favor of one that senses between red/green or blue/green as a method of increasing dynamic range.

Filed in 2005, I can’t determine when it was accepted- but we’ve seen these things before I can’t imagine Nikon launching a major new sensor anytime soon- with the market what it is. Also the last sensor was said to be used in to the metering/whitebalance sensors, so we could be looking at a very limited-use situation again.

Thanks, Anonymous!

dpReview is reporting that Epson UK is saying the Epson R-D1x digital m-mount rangefinder is a Japanese release only.

Wonder if the software will have an english translation… otherwise, it might be hard to get the damned raw files converted the way you want- or always use jpg. But this also might mean that the menus are in Japanese…

Epson Digital Rangefinder Analog Dial

Epson has announced that they’re going to update their Leica-mount digital rangefinder!

As a piece of mechanical art, these things are Monets, I just can’t help being charmed by the wonderfully beguiling analog top-plate dials:

Epson Digital Rangefinder Analog Dial

Here’s the main site that’s got all the details in Japanese.

If, like me, you can’t afford that Leica M8, this might be just the ticket. Visit the guys at the RangeFinder forums for more info!

Ritz Camera ne Wolf Photo ne Boater’s World ne Ritz Interactive has filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy restructuring:

…Ritz Camera Centers Inc., the largest camera-store chain in the U.S., won court approval for $85 million in financing from its existing secured lenders while it reorganizes.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Mary Walrath in Wilmington, Del., authorized the so-called debtor-in-possession financing on an interim basis….

But have received $85 in financing to help it remain a going concern.

It’s really hard for me to cry for them- I first encountered them when they bought up the best mom and pop camera store in my area 10 years ago and their product range went from good to amateur. Then I moved to a different stat- where they soon bought out the best pro shop in the area and the second best pro shop.

Then I started to buy everything from B&H Photo Video.

The last time I walked into a Ritz was about a year ago to buy a D3- they had no waiting list and wouldn’t take my name, but one of the employees said that they had 2 on order for him so that he could turn around and sell them as soon as they came in.

I had a similarily unpleasant situation with RitzCamera.com.

We don’t need these guys.

Hey, remember the DeLorean from Back to the Future? DeLoreans have a really cool design.

Did you know that the DeLorean and F3, F4, F5, F6, and the D3 were designed by the same person? Yup- an Italian designed named Giorgetto Giugiaro.

I paid homage to his design tonight (I don’t need any C&C please, I know I’m no product photographer…what should I do with the camera strap lugs though?) with my D3 and the macro flashes. The design of the F3 really thrills me, it’s really a wonderful machine.

Nikon F3 (Click to enlarge)

I bought some PocketWizard radio strobe triggers recently and was surprised that the prices were way down since they were being discounted. I should have immediately though, “Reducing inventory– new models on the way.”

Oh well- I got some decent prices and I ended up not buying everything I wanted. Well word comes today from the Strobist (you MUST read his site on flashes) that PocketWizard is introducing new, smaller models with added features.

Unfortunately, they’re Canon only for the moment, with Nikon variants to follow.

Both units have pass-through, full TTL contacts in a hot shoe format. Which means no more PC cords needed for hooking them up to speedlights.

Oh thank God! Last night, I had to both hook up the su-800 AND use the PC-Sync to get what I wanted. This would have allowed me to eliminate the use of those really flaky PC cables.

Okay, may as well start with the headline feature: They do remote TTL, and they do it well. They call it “ControlTL,” and it is technologically very different than the way the RadioPopper handles remote TTL.

The PW’s can now be configured via USB to do some interesting things:

Well, the new PWs “know things,” too. Remember how they can replicate the whole light-based wireless TTL operations by jumping the signal timing on the camera-to-flash pre-chatter? Well, what else could you do if you knew the camera was about to fire your flash?

You could tell the flash to fire a little smidge early, is what you could do. And if you could vary the timing on that signal, you could squeeze an extra stop of shutter speed out of most cameras’ sync, too.

Watch their demo:

No, there is no pricing information availabe- damn I hate it when companies announce products and no pricing.

199 for the MiniTT1, $219 for the FlexTT5

Nice!

Fake Canon Blogs Get Takedown Notice

What happens when a company has a dedicated, loyal fanbase who yearn for information and virtually none is forthcoming? Right- they go out of their way to speculate, make it up, and overblow the slightest little hints.

So it shouldn’t be surprising when pointless blogs open up and start filling in the information the companies won’t tell us.

On occasion, it’s taken too far though, and the companies object. Well one of the Canon guys took it a bit too far and has been reprimanded for by it several high-priced, humorless lawyers.

This is a shame all around- it’s up to the speculators to try and not take it too far and it’s up the companies to put enough info in the pipeline to keep everyone appraised of what’s happening. It’s become a whole different world over the last few years- it’s no longer just a few people in a local camera club gossiping and if the companies don’t like what they’re seeing, they should simply give us official information and sites that speculate and put out rumors will simply cease to be appealing.

And hey, what a good time to remind everyone that NikonWatch has no official relation to Nikon Corp or subsidiaries and has not been approved by them. The Nikon Watch logo is a parody of the official Nikon logo.

Every attempt has been made to ensure that NikonWatch is not confused with Nikon itself.

Hats off to DPreview for getting someone to talk on the record about this lens.

Robert Cristina, Manager of professional products, Europe and Ludovic Drean, Product Manager for lenses, Europe talked to DPreview:

…The concept was to give a 50mm equivalent lens on the DX format. A lot of people have bought the 50 1.8 because it was all that was available. It may seem rather late for the APS-C system, but we believed that entry-level users wanted a standard lens…

It’s about price, size and weight. We wanted this to be a lens for the entry-level. If we’d tried to make an FX 35mm F1.4 it might cost €1400, rather than €200… The main target is D40/D60/D90 owners. They make up 80% of our DSLR sales...

Ok, I’m waiting for the expensive FX-sized f/1.4 for ~$1,499usd.

Click the link to read the entire thing.

Nikon 35mm AF-S f/1.8G Samples

DPreview has posted some sample shots taken with the new Nikkor 35mm AF-S f/1.8G here.

35mm AF-S f/1.8G on FX

Some random Japanese guy was in his local camera ginza (I’m sure I’m using the term incorrectly) and slapped the DX lens on his FX camera to show us what it looked like.

Bjorn Reviews 35mm AF-S f/1.8G

Bjorn’s a well-respected, ridiculously techy photographer so I generally pay attention to what he says- as opposed to the other guys who “review” gear they’ve never touched, for example.

A few test shots confirm – not unexpectedly – that the Nikon wizards know their trade. Of course. The 35/1.8 does project an image circle that is bigger than the bare minimum needed for DX, but is smaller than FX. You get heavy vignetting and severe loss of sharpness outside hte DX format area. If you find the fall-offof the corners acceptable, you could just barely scrape by using the FX camera set to 5:4 format.

Note- when you visit his site- you do NOT see the images if you are not logged in. So register, login, etc.

Japan’s Canon Inc reported an 81.5% fall in quarterly profit as a deepening recession hit demand for cameras and office equipment, and it forecast a bigger-than-expected profit decline for 2009.

Operating profit at Canon, the world’s largest digital camera maker ahead of Sony Corp and Nikon Corp, came in at ¥35.8 billion ($401.7 million) in October-December, down from ¥193.58 billion a year earlier.

…For 2009, Canon forecast an operating profit of ¥160 billion, down from ¥496.1 billion a year earlier and compared with the consensus forecast for a ¥309.8 billion profit in a poll of 16 analysts by Reuters Estimates.
…

So, the hurt is all over the place!  Canon’s definitely more diversified than Nikon though.

What’s interesting to me is that most large international companies hedge currencies so that if there’s a dramatic up or down swing, they don’t lose as much money. I wonder to what extent these companies are doing that.

[Update: Thanks to Laurent for correcting the attribution of the code! Also, the Nikon NEF SDK decrypts the WB info too.

Some of us are plenty happy to let CaptureNX, Photoshop, and others worry about turning our NEF’s into something usable, but various intrepid people (who’re smart than I am) like lclevy (Dave Coffin) just can’t let a challenge like encrypted whitebalances alone.

So he’s posted a wad of info on the NEF format and its header as well as some C code for you to open up the whitebalance info.

Interesting (to me), it’s based on the TIFF format. Otoh, the TIFF format is so flexible that I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Luckily, he’s hosted it in France, so there’s no change of DMCA take-down notice being filed.

Speculation: D3xs D700x D3x

There aren’t any good rumor around, so let’s speculate!

Trends What general themes have we been seeing over the last few years:

More Megapixels: This is a no-brainer, the market demands.

Better Noise Characteristics: The market really was not demanding this, but we got it anyway with the D3, then we saw much better than expected noise characteristics in the D3x and Canon still has yet to equal Nikon’s abilities.

Thus I’m going to bet that we’ll see more effort from Canon to attempt to catch up than we’ll see Nikon get substantially better. In addition, this is much more a hardware (sensor) design issue than a software-bottlenecked area- the software is only likely to get marginally better, whether inside the camera, or on my crazy 4-core machine.

Smaller Bodies: There’s no good reason we couldn’t get the D3’s sensor in a smaller body, and voila! Since the D3x is a D3 with a different sensor (and software), we’re very likely to see a D700x or similar.

Backfilling Lenses: Nikon knows it’s missing AF-S primes. They threw the beginner SLR (D40, D60, etc) owners a bone with 50mm (those cameras couldn’t use the AF version). Now they can get us an 85mm AF-S and I’ve got money waiting for a good 35mm AF-S prime.

So what’s missing, lens-wise: Primes- 35mm, 28mm, 16mm fisheye, 85mm. Anything else?

[Update: I'd gladly slap down $2k for an AF-S Noct, preferably in the 35-45mm range.]

More Point-and-shoots: God save us from the Coolpix invasion. They’re cheap, you can’t tell one model from the next, P&S buyers are into megapixel, zoom, size, looks. Nikon is likely to crank them out.

More Special Editions: Hey, remember the horrific gold-edition D60? Want a gold-edition D90?

More Gimics: I’m going to go out on a limb here- we’re going to see movie mode slipped into some existing models, or some D*x bodies with movie mode. I can definitely see it on the D3 and D3x- let’s call them the D3s and D3xs models. Maybe with a touch-screens too.

If we’re lucky, we’ll also see upgraded bodies with WiFi slapped into them (or GPS and WiFi)- it’s too easy, it costs next to nothing, the physical is next to nothing, and the battery usage is tolerable. IMO- only Nikon trying to sell us WT-4a’s has prevented this so far.

More Smaller Stuff: I suspect we’re going to see some interesting smaller projetcs. For example- I can’t see any reason we can get a bluetooth adapter for our flashes to get RF into action without buying pocketwizards or similar add-ons. Like wifi- bluetooth is legal frequency spectrum just about everywhere on earth at this point.

Fewer high-end bodies: Why spend the R&D when the sales of the bodies aren’t going to see a quick return?

Fewer high-end lenses: Those missing primes I just mentioned? Unless they’re just about to be announced (PMA?), they’re unlikely to happen. Same reason as the high-end bodies.