Digital Camera News: Sony Increasing Sensor Production, Nikon Digital SLR Rumors Fly

Sony Increasing Imaging Sensor Production

Last week, Sony announced that they're going to spend 60 billion yen to increase imaging sensor production. Sony is planning to concentrate their efforts on three main areas, after sinking a bunch of money to various projects like developing the processor for the Playstation 3. The three areas of concentration are imaging sensors for cameras and camera phones, advanced circuits for electronics (like TVs), and more cost efficient components for gaming consoles. The new investment into imaging sesnsor production will occur over three years, which started in April.

[via Marketwatch]

Nikon D3/D3x Rumors Fly

If you hang out on the forums of many digital camera websites, you've probably seen all the rumors already. Cnet, in their Crave blog, have kind of summed up some of the latest thoughts on Nikon's new professional level digital SLR. The current leader of the Nikon pack is the NIkon D2Xs. The hope, with most of the rumors out there, is that Nikon will stray from their DX format sensors and produce something like what Canon has in their upper-end SLRs - a full-frame (or close to full-frame) sensor.

According to the post at Crave, a French publication published that the new Nikon camera (probably called the D3) will have an 18.7 megapixel sensor manufactured by Sony. A poster at dpreview.com said that the new Nikon camera will be available in August and will have a full-frame sensor. Another post mentioned that an announcement would occur in June.

Anyway, this is all purely rumor at this point and the Cnet blog post even mentions that many people thought there would be an announcement at the PMA show back in March, but that came and went without a peep from Nikon. In my opinion, something may be coming soon, with all this "chatter" going on on the various photography and enthusiast sites.

Read on for more details from the Cnet Crave blog.