A follow up on this post from yesterday: Nikon Service Point Munchen is selling their Nikon D300s demo camera on eBay:
Nikon Service Point Munchen has been a good indicator of discontinued products in the past: when they sold their last D300 on eBay in 2009, the D300s was announced a month later.
Nikon D3100 sensor
In addition to the Nikon D7000 sensor which is made by Sony, here is some more information from Chipworks on the different sensors in Nikon DSLR bodies:
Nikon will be holding a press conferences in multiple countries on February 9th, 2011 (Wednesday). For all US readers this means that new products will be announced between 11:00pm and midnight EST on February 8th (NR probability rating: 99%).
As of today I am certain only about two new point and shoot cameras to be announced on February 9th – the Coolpix P500 that will have 22.5-810mm (x36) zoom, 12MP back-illuminated CMOS sensor and will cost 299 EUR. The second Coolpix model will have a 24-100mm zoom and fast f/1.8 aperture.
Nikon filed a patent in Japan for a projector built in a DSLR. We already have the Coolpix S1100pj point and shoot camera with a built-in projector and Nikon is at least thinking of bringing that technology into a DSLR camera. The cool part is that the projection will happen through the electronic viewfinder (the initial translation was not clear, so I got this paragraph this directly from the Japan Patent Office):
“When the photographing instrument is set as electronic view finder mode, the photography person can see the taken image displayed on a liquid crystal display panel by looking into a liquid crystal display panel from an eyepiece. On the other hand, when the photographing instrument is set as projector mode, the light which supported reproduced image information is projected on the screen of the photographing instrument exterior via the eyepiece of an electronic view finder, and two or more persons can see the reproduced image simultaneously projected on a screen.”
Chipworks.com is doing something that I always wanted to do – to teardown a camera apart. Few weeks ago they took a Nikon D7000 and documented the guts of the camera. The interesting part? The sensor model IMX071 is made by Sony (direct link to image). This is probably not a surprise, but till now I could not find a proof besides the identical DxOMark score of the D7000 and Sony a580.
There has been some speculations in the past that Nikon recently started producing their own sensors. For the D3100, Nikon described the sensor as:
“The D3100 is equipped with a new Nikon DX-format CMOS image sensor and a new image-processing engine, EXPEED 2, both developed by Nikon”.
The Swiss retailer Brack (in English) has listed the Nikon D300s as “keine nachbestellung möglich” which means “can not be ordered any longer”:
A reader contacted the store directly and got the same response from the product manager. Brack is a large electronics reseller and they deliver to several different stores in Switzerland.
After the release of the D7000, the price of the D300s has fallen down to $1,449.00 for body only.
Today Nikon released a firmware update for the Nikon D3100 (v.1.01). Full list of changes after the break:
