Nikon Mirrorless Announcement Imminent?

Nikon Rumors is reporting that it has confirmed Nikon press events in Austria, Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany, Romania, and China, all for September 21st.

The World's Best Nikon Site, as usual, has a trenchant analysis of the possibilities: "Nikon followers are waiting for four things from Nikon: the D4, the D700 follow up, the D300s follow up, and the mirrorless system." ByThom.com analyzes the potential ramifications of each possibility with typical thoroughness on its "Quick Links & Comments" page. There's no permalink for this specific news item, so you might have to scroll down or go looking for this; the header is "The Strange September Situation."

Meanwhile, the SSS has resulted in one of the most perfectly hilarious press releases I've seen in 23 years in this business, good enough to commemorate in full. Titled "Comments on Media Reports about Nikon's imaging product," it reads—in its entirety—"Nikon understands that some article appeared in the media regarding Nikon's imaging product. Please note that Nikon has made no announcement in this regards."

I totally love this. They're confirming that baseless media speculation is baseless(!).

Good to know.

ByThom puts the skewer through that, though. "...Almost no matter what Nikon does later this month, they won't have correctly managed the perceptions of enough of their current and potential customers."

As if tsunamis weren't bad enough. It's a tough world out there, for sure.

Mike
(Thanks to Vlatko, TOP's Croatian Editor-at-Large)

Send this post to a friend

Please help support TOP by patronizing our sponsors B&H Photo and Amazon

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Thom Hogan: "It's even worse than it first appears. I've discussed this with four different U.S. dealers so far. They all agree: the one product Nikon should announce this month and ship prior to Christmas is the D300s follow up. Their second choice would typically be the D700 follow up, though there's a bit of disagreement that enters at that position. Mirrorless was the third choice of three of the dealers.

"The (good) dealers know what they can sell the most of. None of them tell me that they can sell a lot of mirrorless cameras. Heck, those that already sell them here in the U.S. mostly report modest sales at best.

"This brings up the same thing that happened with automobiles: the Japanese aren't seeing the external markets as different than their home market, and that's going to cause them grief. It certainly is causing them to sell less than they could.

"Every now and again one of the companies takes a chance at something out of the box and it either succeeds (e.g. X100), in which case we get a lot of copying, or it doesn't (e.g. Sony R1), it which case everyone nods to themselves that it's a good thing that they aren't doing things out of the box ;~).

"The U.S. market will gobble up about 50 million of the ~150 million cameras made in 2011. Yet most of the products made aren't optimized for the desires of the U.S. user base. Canon, Nikon, Sony, et. al, need design centers in the U.S. (and probably Europe). They need to learn to take base technology platforms and optimize them for the local markets, à la Toyota and Nissan in the '90s."

Comments

[erlik]

What's even more interesting is that Nikon apparently refers to an article in Nikkei, mentioned here by Reuters, where the price point was revealed.

That is, "the company will price the mirrorless camera plus lens at 70,000 yen-100,000 yen ($900-$1,300), which is on a par with rivals' offerings".

So, what now? Nikon is going to price the camera at $500 or $1500 just to avoid being put in the quoted price bracket?

(PS. Thanks to Petapixel for pointing out the article.)

[Patrick Perez]

Mike called www.bythom.com "The World's Best Nikon Site" which I take (very) slight exception to. But only in that calling it a Nikon site limits its appeal. Thom covers other brands (though to far lesser extent) and comes across as entirely objective in covering Nikon and is definitely not a 'fanboy' in the pejorative sense (which I don't think you were suggesting). Frankly, when I specifically want to know the straight dope on a Nikon product, Thom is the guy, just like Michael Reichman at www.luminous-landscape.com is the guy for Canon information. Both are expert on the respective platforms and provide good insight as to the actually usability of the respective makes.

Patrick
(singing to the choir again... good thing I love the sound of my own voice (g))

[Zach]

Westerners want "trophy cameras". Who knew.

[Kelvin]

I think it's inaccurate for people to say that companies like Nikon need to think harder about the US market as if it's somehow the most important one. The big market for luxury goods is now China.

[scotth]

This is on the heels of this Bloomberg article as well,

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-07/canon-clinging-to-mirrors-means-opportunity-for-sony-cameras.html

Stockholders are not going to like decreasing market share.

It is going to be interesting to see how things unfold.

[RobG]

Personally, I don't see myself needing to upgrade for a few years - I just bought a second D700 (dealer demo, cheap, with full warranty) and can't think of anything that Nikon might add to a D800 that might make me want to swap bodies. There's a few things I'd like changed, but not enough to make me cough up the four-and-a-half large that Nikon Australia will ask for the D800.

I MIGHT be swayed into getting a D400 (or whatever it's called) as an upgrade to my D200 if I ever need to shoot serious DX again, but I'm as happy as a pig in mud with what I have.

Which I guess, a lot of people who aren't digital gearheads are - the current outgoing crop of bodies from every company are awesomely good. Way better than most of the people using them are, or will ever be. That's sort of sad, in a way.

(I specified 'digital' gearheads, because underneath my photographer hat is a serious nutter for finely made, precision machinery - I like old cameras. Not that I own a lot of them, but I'd like to.)

[Leigh Youdale]

I wonder what a camera would look like these days if Apple designed it?

[Rory]

I suspect an Apple camera would look like an iPhone ...