The August Surprise

Nikon's next scheduled press conference is August 27th. I've already noted that the D90 and 18-105mm lens will be introduced shortly, so I think it likely that those two items are on the schedule for that meeting. The question everyone is asking is "what else?" Frankly, the speculation is getting a little out of hand and becoming entirely unrealistic, so I suspect a lot of people are going to be disappointed. It's unrealistic to expect much in the way of lens announcements, for example, yet I've seen people peel off lists of as many as 10 lenses they expect to see introduced. Try two or three. That would still mean that Nikon introduced more lenses in 2008 than any previous year in the DSLR era.

Likewise, I've seen speculation on as many as four DSLR bodies being announced. Again, not likely. Indeed, I think we already know what will be announced: the D90 and an updated D3 (bigger buffer, minor changes), call it the D3s. Any more than that and Nikon has gotten even more aggressive than we know them to be.

The reason I'm pessimistic on anything else has to do with the Olympics. I've never known Nikon to miss a chance at promoting a new pro product at the Olympics if they had one. As far as I can tell, Nikon was scrambling like mad just to get VR exotics and buffer upgrades into pro photographers hands for Beijing. Had there been another pro camera about to ship, it would have been at least sampled (lent to key opinion leaders) at the Olympics. You can't put an embargo on publishing images on Olympic photographers, so we would have seen some indication of the high rez FX body already if it was near shipping (hint: look at EXIF data from Nikon photographers ;~). Plus the press core is pretty leaky, too. Even though they're bound by NDAs, they talk amongst themselves and then the others who aren't bound by an NDA form the leak. Short answer: there have been no leaks of loaners, no EXIF data that indicates anything other than D3 and D300's used.

It now appears that my 2008 pro body predictions were backwards. I predicted the D3x would appear and that the D700 would be pushed to a 2009 ship. I'm now thinking that I must have misunderstood my original source and got the products reversed. Even if a high resolution body is announced soon, I don't see any of the indications I look for showing that it is ready to ship.

Of course, what I've written here is also speculation. I simply don't know any details about the high resolution FX body at the moment. If it were about to pop, I normally would, thus I have to conclude that it's not about to pop. That doesn't mean that it won't appear, only that the expectation that it's something you can max out your credit card on in the near future is unrealistic.

Frankly, I'm enjoying what we have. Exploring replacing the AA filter with plain IR blocking glass has shown me that there's another 15% or so resolution improvement to be had if you don't photograph subjects that are likely to produce moire. Note to Nikon: we don't need an AA filter on the high resolution FX body. Really. We don't need it.

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