Monday 14 October 2013

Nikon D610 first thought, second edition/clean up the mess

Last autumn I was wondering if I should get the Nikon D600 or the Nikon D800. At the time it was known that the Nikon D800 had some autofocus issues, but it was still early in the Nikon D600 life cycle and only few rumours were available to indicate that the Nikon D600 had a oil/dust issue. Lucky I went with the Nikon D800.

It is interesting that Nikon decided to have to different approaches to fixing the issues that were in these two cameras. The left autofocus issue in the Nikon D800 were fixed in in the production line and through the repair site. The story is different with the Nikon D600. You can still get it fixed by the repair site, but every new camera has the potential to have a "broken" shutter which might lead to dust/oil in the sensor.

Nikon apparently decided that it was to expensive or impossible in the current design to replace the shutter in the production line with the one in the Nikon D610 as this would have been the best choice. Do like the Nikon D800 fix the cameras that comes in for repair and make sure that new items wasn't exposed to the issue. That would have been the best marketing approach that Nikon could have done.

I think it all came down to economics. Nikon decided that it was impossible/to expensive to clean up the mess that the Nikon D600 had done, so they made some small changes and introduced the new Nikon D610, which is just the second edition of the Nikon D600. I am sure that the marketing department wasn't happy about this decision.

The new Nikon D610 will come under very close inspections when it starts to ship to the customers and just a small fraction of dust/oil rumours could be the worst marketing nightmare that Nikon can dream of, so if Nikon has done its homework this camera and shutter have been under heavy testing to make sure that there isn't any dust/oil issues.

I wouldn't worry about buying the Nikon D610 as I am sure that Nikon has done its homework in regard to the dust/oil issue. If I had a Nikon D600 I would start to test the camera to make sure that the camera didn't have the issue. Thom Hogan has provided with a simple method to do this here.

Follow the Nikon D610 at Nikon Index.

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