Back on March 15th I posted that I believed that a Z8 was not Nikon’s next camera announcement. I obviously have been proven wrong.
But as I note elsewhere, I’m not sure that most of Nikon outside of Tokyo knew exactly what was going to be launched until fairly recently, let alone those who were given gear to try or test and from which a lot of the rumors originally generated. Quite a few prototypes and mules were floating around in late 2022 and early 2023. That also explains some rumored pieces of information about the new camera wrong (e.g. 3m dot versus 9m dot EVF): multiple cameras were circulating, with different characteristics.
The part I got right in that earlier article was basically the sequence of announcements that were to come. We indeed got two announcements prior to fiscal financials (wide angle DX lens and Z8). #3 and #4 are givens at this point. The #5 and #6 bits in my expected sequence are almost certainly the 180-600mm or another lens, not a camera. I have more to say about Nikon’s current product lineup elsewhere in today’s coverage.
Sometimes you can see the machinery working, but not the details of what it’s doing. Nikon has doubled down on secrecy again recently. I’m not exactly sure why, particularly when you just use a two-week clock countdown to a product launch. You really want to build marketing excitement for the launch, and watching a clock doesn’t do that. What I saw in the official information I received in the week prior to launch appears to indicate that the marketing work came very late in the process.