It's a rhetorical question, and a bit of a comeback to the one asked a week ago in this forum about the D400, but I think it's a useful thought-experiment. My answer would be that I wouldn't pay anything for a D3300 because I'm not interested in it. Is Nikon listening to us or give a damn? Thom Hogan's
latest commentary on this issue captures the frustration many of us feel with Nikon, and the answer is obvious, they don't give a damn.
I have a lot of respect for Hogan, but I am getting an increasing feeling that he is succumbing to a common reviewer trap. He is not reviewing cameras, he is reviewing cameras for an audience. There is an unacknowledged tendency to play to the audience. In this case the audience is a group of interweb people that tend to acquiesce to each others' opinions, and this commonality becomes the norm. The reviews then become predictable and repetitious, as the One True Interweb Opinion is arrived at.
This is the case with reviews of the Df, of the EM-1, and of the D3300. The tendency to look at a single model in isolation.
Take a step back. Look at overall trends and tendencies and slow evolution. It's not reviewers or web posters that declare what consumer product is a success. It's the Market: the thousands and thousands of nameless and faceless consumers who vote with their money, based on their own judgement of what works. This is the target of consumer product manufacturers, not (and I don't except myself) self-absorbed and self-important bloggers and forum posters.
In the D3300 Nikon has introduced a luxury toy with much higher resolution than the vaunted Olympus EM-1 luxury toy, with likely faster operation, at a lighter weight than the Olympus, better direct SLR viewing, and with a brand new collapsible lens at LESS than half the price of the Olympus body alone. Consumers will think this is a fantastic package and will by it by the hundreds of thousands. Why not? In terms of picture taking ability and image quality, they give up nothing and save lots.
The market is wise, and determines the success of the product. This product doesn't have to be innovative (although, how is it not??), and so what if many variations are released? This is how a major manufacturer stays competitive, vs a bet-the-house product like the EM-1.
The bloggers and posters have declared the death of the DSLR repeatedly, but the market begs to differ.
If we need to take a nice picture at a nice price point the tools are there, Nikon or other. Or we can grouse to each other that the manufactures are stupid because they deliver to the market rather than my own personal demands.
