[Update: No clue when, no clue where, no clue what.]

Oh who knows? We get so many reports of this kind… Maybe a D3x will be announced, maybe some more bland, pointless Coolpix’s will be announced (”This one’s in blue! These go to 11!“), maybe there’ll be something that knocks our socks off- trying to predict it is pointless.

I don’t know if it’s true but here it is anyway: Nikon will have a new annoucement this coming Wednesday, August 6, 2008. I have no idea what they will annouce. Might be a new D3X or maybe a new D90 or some other camera or lenses. Let’s hope it’s true and some new equipment is coming.

[Edited for poor proof-reading.]

I’m starting to see D90 rumors flying (thanks to everyone who sent them in). Don’t know if they’re really D900 rumors or if there’ll be a D90 and a D900- but I’m thinking that would just confuse things for now.

In any case, from Thom (if you believe it):

Technically, Nikon has been a bit behind on that. In the consumer market, sensor cleaning and ubiquitous VR (via the sensor) and live view all got established by competitors well before Nikon did it. That’s going to shift a bit with the D90, I think, but the D60 is an example of Nikon NOT doing the above. And in the higher lineup, of course Canon beat Nikon to the punch with FX, affordable FX, pixel counts, and high ISO capabilities. It’s only in this current design cycle that we see Nikon now trying to do what you suggest.

In-body VR would be great– if it worked well. I remember way old Sony digicams that would do VR by cropping your sensor and then as you moved the camera, they’d just use a part of the chip that had been cropped until you had moved it-so basically selectively using part of the chip.

Also- Gizmodo and other sites are reporting a possible Sept 3rd Nikon conference, to maybe announce something new like the D90 or maybe D3x… who knows?

I got a report that Nikon may be BUYING FujiFilm. No I can’t substantiate it, no I can’t find anything but periodic reports of this going back for years. I’m not actually sure what Nikon would get out of it- possibly some sensor patents from Fuji like the one for using different sized pixels in their sensor to get better dynamic range.

Though I think it’d be smarter to simply license any patents Nikon would like, rather than buy Fuji wholesale. Also, Nikon seems to be doing fine in the sensor-design category itself…

Remember this story from a while back where Nikon got a patent on a non-Bayer sensor?

Well, a birdie sends a pretty picture of its layout and writes:

– A new type of pixel/micro-lens arrangement allows hexagonal elements (pixels) and a cartesian (x-y) read out.

-Maximizing efficiency (capture area) of every ray of light goes though the micro-lenses.

-There is limit on the smallest size of each micro-lens (due to the mirrors), hence resolution of this type of sensor may limit to the pixel pitch of 10 micro-meters. Still, enough for 135 film formats to deliver nearly 10 million pixels with true R-G-B each.

Of course, this birdie wouldn’t tell me where he gets his info from- so I can’t tell how much credence to give this one…

After chatting with him a little more, this means that the sensor would be roughly 7.2*3=21.6mp equivalent if you try to evaluate it in Bayer-sensor terms:

You can say that. Since the interpretation of pixel counts is quite confusing right now, just say it will provide same if not better detail as the 20mp bayer-sensors, with much more accurate color pattern reproduction.

Strange item from a Nikon list:

>[When the D4 comes out]- Will this be when
>a “mirrorless” viewfinder is developed?

When I asked a very senior Nikon person from Japan this same question last year, the answer was that we would be seeing a mirrorless dslr “sooner than you think”.

This is kind of strange, I’m not even sure what “mirrorless dslr” means. I’m really hoping that it doesn’t mean that we get an electronic viewfinder instead- with liveview (finally), I’m not sure what the point would be.

Maybe they’re bringing back the pellicle mirror concept like they had on the F3H- here’s a good shot of the pellicle mirror.

More guessing- if we have great noise-free images at higher ISO like we have on the D3- then the light falloff from the pellicle mirror is no longer an issue- and we have a sensor that can either shut itself off (so we don’t need a moving shutter) or use an LCD or similar to electronically prevent light from hitting the sensor, then we could have a VERY high-speed, camera that is nearly silent!

[Update: Confirmed per the Strobist. See the next post.]

This thread on flickr is stating that the SB-900 flash has a thicker shoe than the SB-800 and similar flashes and apparently, this is causing trouble for people who try and mount the flash directly to various accessories.

The SB-600 not only drops a pin into a hole like David Hobby mentioned, but also raises two (very) small clamps from the level of the metal base, e.g. to prevent falling out of non-Nikon accessories.

It looks like it’s the same for the SB-900 …

I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere else, however, some I’m filing it under Rumors for now.

I’m having a hard time believing that it’ll be 24.4mp- I’m think it’ll be a bit larger, but:

Although the rumors were strong for an announcement of the 24MP D3x/4 around end of august early september, it looks like its a no show.

I was contacted by an old friend who works for nikon, and even though the 24.4MP camera is going around and will be at the olympics (from what i understood still only as an early prototype), there is no intention of bringing it into production until after the end of 2008.

When I asked him repeatedly if he was sure, he insisted in a very confident matter, that if nikon was going to announce something that big in the time frame given he would have known. I insisted that there had to be some truth in the august rumor, and this time he said: “if its true, then they will surprise everyone, including official dealers – the only thing to come next is the full range of new coolpix cameras” …

Yeah, I also thought August was super unlikely- just too close to the D3 and D700.

A little birdie says:

After the D700, the D900 will be on the way with more megapixels.  This is a rumor from a friend who has connections to Nikon office in my country.

So maybe the D900 will end up being the “halfway” megapixel camera with ~18mp- halfway between the D3’s/D700’s light sucking 12mp and the (presumably) 24-28mp D3x’s not-quite light sucking sensor.

But who knows? There’s a lot of wiggle room between 12mp and 24-28 or so.

It’d also be interesting to see two body styles from now on- really fast, huge  pro body- D3 and the half-sized, same sensor, not quite as fast prosumer body like the D700.

A little birdie writes:

Nikon shows us having 2 D700 bodies on pending release. That usually means
they will ship any day so expect them to hit the market in the next few
days.

It’s nice to see that Nikon appears to be good about keeping this retail channel!

Thom reports:

On some Internet forums I posted that I thought the high resolution FX body might be in the D700-sized body. Apparently not. I received a message out of Japan that the high-resolution camera [ed: presumedly the d3x] is in the D3 body. I trust that message more than my guess, though please note that having one (usually good) source does not mean something is verified. A few f/1.4 primes apparently will appear with that body. A Coolpix with raw capabilities was also mentioned, which would align with the P6000 rumors (13+mp, 28-112mm ED VR, optional GPS and LAN).  Others are predicting a 24-120mm VRII and 70-200mm VRII. That would be nice, but I am not holding my breath. Note that even three or four primes would put Nikon well over their usual yearly lens quota. On the other hand, every one of the next batch of lenses I hear about seem to be just G, AF-S, and/or VR iterations of existing designs…

I see the D3x, I also see the P6000 or something like it to try and compete with Canon’s G9, I’m hoping for the primes but I’m not holding my breath or placing any money on it. The p6000 keeps getting mentioned with “LAN” capability- the French magazine had that in their feature list- I think this needs to be translated as “built-in WiFi” like on other Nikon Coolpix’s rather than an ethernet LAN connection.

I suppose the 24-120mm augment the 18-200mm? I’m betting it won’t be a pro/fixed aperture lens.

I’m marking this as a rumor because I can’t see that the D700 can be that bad- the 100% crops are not anywhere near sharp compared to the 5D, it just can’t be that bad.

Here’s the translated version (in Japanese I’m told it’s Chinese, sorry, they look very similar to me!) I think/hope that they just hosed up the comparison.

One-off report of the launch / announcement of the D3x / D4:

My local dealer *wink, wink* told me yesterday that if he had to “cough, cough” guess, then the D3x/D4 would most likely launch in October which will give Sony a month with its A900 camera since they are using the same sensor. It makes some sense.

I have a hard time buying it- dealers don’t seem to know much more than we do these days (as far as I can tell, feel free to correct me).

Otoh- that would make it roughly a year after the D3 announcement so…

D’oh! Late last night, I completely forgot that you absolutely could use the 13mp on that (potentially real) Coolpix P6000 without a ton of noise by using pixel-binning.

Basically- take a few adjacent photo-receptors, get their values, and munge them together. I’m presuming it’ll be much smarter than just an averaging, but who knows, so I’ll use the term “munge”.

In theory, you just increased the sensitivity of the sensor, but decreased the resolution. So maybe if we munge it down to an effective 3-4mp image, we might get a lot less noise than you’d expect, which would be fantastic. Most of the times I’m going to use a P&S are in situations where the lighting is terrible (think parties) and the shots aren’t likely to be worth bringing out the D3.

I’m starting to see fakes of the “D800“. I’m betting that the likelihood of these being real is just about nil- I can’t possibly imagine Nikon putting out another bother so soon about the D700, so I’m going to keep an eye on it and see where it goes. I also don’t want to report on every single damned wing-nut who goes and spends 20 minutes in Photoshop! Leave that to the other guy.

And over at Luminous Landscape and other places, we’re seeing a shot of a possible new Coolpix P6000 that actually looks like a smaller rip-off of the Canon G series. I’ve got a G3 and it is/was a really cool camera (for 2004).

Ordinarily, I don’t report on Coolpixs because Nikon comes out with Coolpix’s so frequently and they’re so uninspired that it’d be like reporting that I got up in the morning, but this one’s got (supposedly):

• 13.5 MP sensor

• 28-112mm 4X zoom
• VR optical image stabilization
• Raw Mode
• ISO to 6400
• optical viewfinder
• GPS (?)
• Can use the SB-800 (SB-900 too? No reports of CLS though.)
• LAN something or other? (I’m guessing it’s a wifi connection with an up-sell to a hosting service like we’ve seen on the other Coolpix’s)

13.5mp @ 6400iso huh? Remember that paper where the researchers grabbed a couple webcams, taped them over so they couldn’t see anything and then used the images as cheap sources of truly random (though not nec. uniformly distributed) numbers? Yeah, a 13.5mp coolpix would make a really good source of random noise! August release, guess we’ll know soon enough.

But raw mode’s cool! If only Nikon provided a free SDK so that I could make my own intervalometer code, and other fun stuff, then it’d be just about as good as a Canon G-series…

A bit ago, a really super-nice birdie told me what the D3’s minimum advertised price (MAP) was. The MAP is the lowest price that you can quote in an advertisement. So when you see those “Prices too low to advertise!” or “Click here to see a lower price”, it’s because they’re selling lower than the MAP (presumedly).

So this birdie clearly had a product price dump from the official Nikon Dealer site and I asked if he could give me the wholesale. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t say, but did say that he’d be very surprised to see it going for less than $4,600 (USD) any time soon (wink, wink).

If you see anyone willing to sell you a D3 for anywhere near that price right now, ask yourself if it’s really too good to be true.

[Update: The birdie that said he was having a problem with the firmware reset everything and was fine again. Do you have any issues with the firmware? Mail me (see address on the right).]

Reports (via dpReview so far) as that it makes the focusing better and more accurate in low-light situations.

The US download site for Windows is here, Mac-heads can get it here.

On the other hand, I’ve got at least one report that the f-stops aren’t being recorded properly into EXIF data.

Also interesting is that while there were confirmed reports of the 1.12a/b firmware, it appears to never have gotten released.

Software’s tricky…

No, this is not a fake video from the guy in Santa Barbara (as far as I can tell)- and the video would be reasonably hard to fake since we get some closeup shots of the D700:

Nikon D700 présentation
by focusnumerique
You get the first reasonably close shot at 1:47. I’ll see if I can get a quick translation going…

Honestly don’t know what to make of this one- chaos is reigning, I can’t tell fake from maybe real any more with the D700. This article isn’t helping much- they’ve actually got a shot of the “D700″ next to a D3 and there aren’t any markings on it- there’s no “D700″ on it or “D3′ marking on the D3…

When Nikon sends out engineering test cameras, do they not have the model number silk-screened onto the body? And if they did, why would the D3 not have marking? Strange, tending toward fake?

Here’s the article and here’s the translation:

Also, it occurs to me- if it has a built-in sensor cleaner, then how is it possible that it’s using the same chip as the D3? Is the cleaning independent of the chip? If it’s the same sensor as the D3 AND has sensor cleaning, isn’t that a step up?!Furthermore, why aren’t we seeing a huge lens like the 85mm f/1.4 on there? Nikon tends to put overly large lenses on their product shots… I might be reading too much into that in this case.

Karl had a talk with “za mole”:

Just had a puzzling conversation with my very well-connected Nikon mole in London. He says that the SB-900 announcement is imminent, but the D700 is still some time off announcement. Unexpected.

“Ah sheet!”

Not sure what to make of this one. I’ll call it anomalous and see what happens tomorrow, I suppose. Karl’s also not sure how likely this is.

Thanks Karl!

The links! They flood my inbox- I got a metric ton of them, thanks for sending!

Here’s the translated article for the D700 in photoscala.de. Interestingly, if I can understand the translation, this is just a picture of the previously reported article from Profifoto, another German magazine.

The only interesting thing (to me) that’s in the specs that we hadn’t already seen was the built-in sensor cleaning:

The same 12-megapixel sensor, apparently the same 51-point autofocus system, slightly lower image speed serial (5 fps instead of 9 fps – however, the battery part to 8fps increase), the viewfinder field of 95 instead of 100 percent, but but a built-in flash (also for wireless flash control), a sensor-cleaning system (more about this tomorrow) and an interesting price tag: just under 2,600 euro, the new costs and from the end of July 2008 will be available.

Wow, I hope that price isn’t right for us Americans because we can nearly have a D3 for that (~$4000usd today).

Oh hey, remember that report that the chip was being made by Renasis (? Even I can’t dig up the post or recall how to spell it)- well that’s resurfacing. Someone remind me how to spell it so that I can look it up again!