where there’s smoke there’s fire

This is according to Reuters:

“Nikon Corp. said on Thursday it intended to form wide-ranging ties with online and mobile device companies to provide more ways of storing and sharing photographs taken on its digital cameras.”

Nikon have filed some cell phone related patents in the past.

Update: the #1 spot is for DSLR camera sales in Japan (the direct translation means “interchangeable lens type digital camera manufacturer”, thanks for the translation Michael).

BCNranking got their stats for 2010 (January-June) and Nikon is #1 by market share for sales of interchangeable DSLR lenses in Japan:

Canon moved to #2 by losing almost 8% compared to 2009 (ouch!).

For the same period, the best selling DSLR camera is the Nikon D90 (total of 3 Nikon DSLRs in the top 5):

Nikon stock gained 4% on the Tokyo stock exchange today (July 7th, 2010).

This could explain why there are no new product announcements from Nikon – they are doing pretty good in terms of sales.

This is an anonymous tip I received few days ago – I was hoping to get more info, but unfortunately there is no way to contact back the sender:

“New camera due in few weeks
Hi,
I have a photo taken with Nikon camera which will be released within few weeks. EXIF is obfuscated, but there are few things I notice:

Good news: it looks better then 12Mpix DX sensor in tonal dynamics. Transitions on skin are very nice.
Bad news: it is not even 20 Mpix – no huge upgrade. Judging from image quality it will be DX camera (too noisy to be FX).”

Maybe this reader can send us the picture so we can better evaluate it here on NR – this can be done by uploading it to one of the anonymous image hosting sites like Bayimg, Imageshack or Rapidshare and emailing me the link or posting it as a comment to this thread. Thanks!