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Nikon has officially announced the D3x today, and the Internet is, well, less than thrilled. Seriously, I can’t remember the last time I saw a camera announcement get so badly blasted by photographers around the net so quickly.

First, the specs. The Nikon D3x is an upgrade to the Nikon D3, with the biggest difference being the resolution being upped from 12 megapixel full-frame on the D3 to 24 megapixel full-frame on the D3x. Then there are some odd areas where the D3x has poorer specs than the D3:

• Burst shooting speed drops from 11 fps to 7 fps
• The D3′s ISO range was 200-6400, plus HI1 and HI2. The D3x gives you 100-1600, plus HI1 and HI2, which surely won’t be as “hi” as the D3′s famous boosted ISO settings

And then the biggie, which is why everyone’s complaining: the price. The D3x will have a list price of $8,000 — $3,000 more than the D3. And that’s three times the list price of the 21 megapixel Canon 5D Mark II ($2700 retail price.) I’m not sure who the target audience is that Nikon thinks will spend that kind of money on more pixels — maybe medium format photographers looking for something different? Here are a few samples of other people around the net wondering about Nikon’s pricing strategy for the D3x.

Thom Hogan writes

We can’t talk about the D3x without talking about the D3 and pricing. D3 prices have been collapsing for some time. That’s despite the fact that Nikon has not lowered the price to dealers (at least here in the US; not 100% sure about the rest of the world). That’s a sign of very weak demand, as in at least one advertised price I could find, the dealer was selling below what they paid for the product. Now we get a camera that is really only different in the sensor (and FX sensors cost basically the same to manufacturer, no matter what the pixel count on them [yes, there's probably a modest yield difference, but not enough to justify much of a price change]), yet we have a substantive price increase. Anyone else see the problem with this picture? Nikon’s asking us to pay more for the equivalent. I say equivalent because you can look at it this way: you can buy the same camera with either high ISO and dynamic range improvements, or you can have it with more pixels. For some reason, more pixels costs US$3000. Really?

[...]

Nikon has a big problem with the D3x, I think. It’s last to the market (FX, high resolution), with everything riding solely on the sensor. And they’re asking a huge price for it. At US$4999 the risk of failure wouldn’t have been very large. At its US$7999 price, it really needs to perform beyond expectations for it to shore up the top side of Nikon’s lineup. On the plus side, the pixel-deprived Nikon shooters will initially appreciate the part of the camera that addresses that issue, but I wonder whether it’s enough to make the D3x a winning product.

Ken Rockwell:

Nikon wants eight grand for this $5,500 camera, based solely on image quality, however the D3X’ image quality ought to be about the same as (maybe worse than) the $2,700 Canon 5D Mark II. The D3X ergonomics are far superior to Canon, but the D3 has the same ergonomics as the D3X, but for half the price and with twice the frame rate and four times the ISO of the D3X.

Michael Reichmann at Luminous Landscape:

It seems to me that at a $3000 premium over the otherwise almost identical D3, and at some $5000 more than the Canon 5D MKII and Sony A900, the pricing of the Nikon (especially in our current crisis economy) is simply out to lunch. A $1,000 premium I could have understood. Maybe even, $1,500. But with only more megapixels on offer I simply find the D3x to be financially out of tune with the realities of today’s marketplace.

Good luck, Nikon! Nobody seems to happy with this one so far…

Apparently, if you go hunting around in the new Nikon D3 1.10 firmware for interesting text strings, you’ll find a few mentions of a D3X, and resolutions listed in the firmware that are higher than what existing Nikons can reach (for example, 6048×4032, which gives you 24.4 megapixels.)

The natural assumption is that a 24 megapixel Nikon D3X will be released in the near future, and use a similar firmware base, which would explain how those strings wound up in the D3 firmware. Another theory is that the 24 megapixel sensor has been put into D3 bodies for testing purposes, and those testers are using the stock Nikon D3 firmware. I would think you could just build a special firmware for those test cameras in that case, and not leak the D3X info in the D3′s firmware. Who knows.

Definitely far from definite, but it’s a quasi-official — if unintended — mention of a Nikon D3X, so it seems worth mentioning.

UPDATE, December 1, 2008: And today, more than half a year later, Nikon officially announced the D3x, although they somehow claim that it’s 24.5 megapixels, when really you have to round up to get to 24.4. That extra 0.1 megapixel will surely make all the difference in sales.