Nikon Corp. plans to introduce a new type of single-lens reflex camera as early as this fiscal year, President Makoto Kimura said.
The “new concept” model will probably have an enhanced function for video recording and may adopt the so-called mirrorless structure, Kimura said in an interview today in Tokyo. “It could be any time this fiscal year or the following year, as new models are starting to sell,” he said, declining to specify when the product will be available.
Nikon, Japan’s biggest SLR camera maker, has been intensively focusing on development of the product to fuel revenue growth of digital SLR cameras, Kimura said. The company aims to boost sales of cameras with interchangeable lenses about 80 percent to 6.65 million units in three years to March 2013, Nikon said last month.
In April, Panasonic Corp. started selling a new model of mirrorless camera, lightweight models that don’t have the mirror used in conventional SLR cameras that allows the user to see the same image in the viewfinder as the lens captures. Sony Corp. introduced a similar model last month.
Sales in Japan of cameras with interchangeable lenses rose 35 percent in unit terms and 26 percent by value in May, partly because of the introduction of the news models, according to electronics research firm BCN Inc. in Tokyo.
Global Camera Shipments
Worldwide shipments of digital cameras rose 21 percent in the five months to May 31 from a year earlier, according to Tokyo-based Camera & Imaging Products Association. Revenue from cameras with interchangeable lenses jumped 42 percent while that from compact cameras gained 14 percent.
Nikon rose 4.1 percent to close at 1,611 yen in Tokyo trading today, narrowing its decline this year to 12 percent. Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 Stock Average gained 2.8 percent today.
Tokyo-based Nikon is in its first year of a three-year business plan in which the company aims to boost net income to 65 billion yen ($736 million). That’s more than double the 30 billion yen net income the company forecasts for the year started April 1.
Nikon is targeting record sales of 1.1 trillion yen for the year ending March 2013, 25 percent higher than the 880 billion yen revenue expected for the current fiscal year, the company said June 18.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-08/nikon-plans-new-concept-slr-camera-as-early-as-this-year-kimura-says.htmlNikon's president has announced that the company are working on a 'new concept camera' which will feature improved video capabilities.
Makoto Kimura told Bloomberg in an interview yet to be fully published, that the company will introduce a Panasonic GH1 competitor with "enhanced function for video recording" (Makoto's own words)
The camera will be mirrorless and Makoto claims that "these new models are starting to sell". Well I never would have thought it! (RED's Jim Jannard is right with one critisism of the Japanese corporations - nobody innovates with brave new concepts unless someone else takes the step first with success).
Nikon are aiming at 80% growth rate for DSLRs and are pumping greater resources into R&D to roll out the new mirrorless models sooner.
There have been various rumours of a Nikon mirrorless direct live view camera for a while now. One of the rumours concerned a 16mm sized sensor with c-mount sized primes. The camera will most likely feature a new lens mount as with all the other mirrorless cameras. It will be interesting to see what features of existing Nikon DSLR lenses will be compatible via the official Nikon adapter.
It is unknown what sensor size the final camera will have. I'd like to see two.
* A Sony NEX competitor - ultra thin, with smaller 16mm sensor and c-mount sized primes. Genuinely small lenses
* A professional metal bodied GH2 competitor with APS-C sized sensor and full HD with proper scaling, fewer megapixels and better low light performance, plus a decent codec. That would be the minimum requirement for me to make the jump from the GH1(B) or GH2.
I'd also like to see full AF and OIS compatibility for existing Nikon lenses on the new body, i.e. proper electronic contacts and not just an alloy lens mount adapter.
Screen wise, let's hope we get an articulating one and remember that with every new DSLR with video we get the chance to finally achieve some kind of live HDMI output, especially with the constant advances in electronics allowing faster CPUs and encoding chips.
That Nikon are officially confirmed as joining the DSLR party possibly as early as this year, is a very exciting prospect.
The other possible implication I've spotted from this announcement of 'enhanced video functionality' is that since the 'new concept' Nikon camera would almost certainly by mirrorless and positioned lower than full frame cameras like the D3S, it may spur Nikon onto improving the video functionality on higher end models too, because to have a consumer model out perform a high end DSLR like the future D4S would be very wrong. So there you go - official confirmation of 1080p and RAW on the D4S (sort of, with wide grin!)
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http://www.eoshd.com/content/273-Nikon-finally-doing-a-GH1รอกันหน่อยนะครับ สาวก นิคอน
