You're deluding yourself if you believe Nikon are unaware of the situation with all pre sales in every sector of their global market. They've changed the price just before the camera is physically available, hopefully resellers will honour pre-order prices. It makes the Jersey price awful tempting! (if they honour it). I don't have any issue with Nikon re-adjusting the price given the competition, to put it down as an error is frankly laughable though. Nikon UK have seen the opportunity and have raised the price, that's how commercialism works and they'll make some nice money from their move.
D800 official release
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Yes, obviously, all that time questioning the usefulness of the D800s resolution, it's slow speed and defending the 5DIII on these forums, I should have been more subtle...
Double agent!
Seriously though, I really don't believe brs is a Nikon employee
That's strange. The ones I actually used felt much more cramped. Maybe it was the layout of the controls then, that my sausage fingers protested over. They didn't suit my hands whatever it was. It was so long ago now that I can't even remember what the cameras I tried were. Still, that was the only thing that stopped me going to Nikon as at the time I had no lenses at all, or anything else for that matter. The 300D is still going too, it's now my sisters backup to the 30D I just gave her
{edit} This is bugging me now. I'm wondering if I preferred the feel of the Canon with a battery grip then. Maybe I've just used that as a reference and over time forgotten the real reason! I shall scour my old posts across the internet
- bah these forums only seem to hold searchable posts going to 2010. Guess I'll never know 
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Man of Honour
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That's mainly why I don't buy it - there's no reason to pretend it's a mistake. If they wanted to raise the price, knock themselves out, people would still buy it. So why basically say 'We're incompetent and got the price wrong'?
A second reason being I'm also fairly sure that Nikon UK won't have much control of pricing for these units either, deals and promotions on lower end units that have been out for a while will be in their control but they'll have little say in the pricing of brand new high end bodies.
Next, if it's a reaction to the 5DIII pricing, why the simultaneous hike in the D4 price? It's price and it's competitors has been set for months.
Lastly, it somewhat fits with the D800 being too cheap for sense. It was close to too good to be true at £2200. A brand new, high resolution sensor which must cost shedloads (not just R&D to produce a sensor of that sped but the yield can't be brilliant for a sensor like that) and a release price below the D700's despite inflation? That was very surprising lets face it.
I seriously think it's just a mistake, stale exchange rates, missing tax or shipping calculations, who knows, but unless we see similar prices rises in other countries there's not much reason to think it's a conspiracy or a profit orientated move. There's far more reasons to think it isn't.
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Double agent!
Seriously though, I really don't believe brs is a Nikon employee
I confess, I was sent by Hasselblad...
Caporegime
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Double agent!
Seriously though, I really don't believe brs is a Nikon employee
bet he is
only a nikon employee will say such a thing.
does anyone actually believe the reasoning behind a price misprint LOL
Unless Nikon are completely inept there will be months and months of sales calcs and profit forecasts carried out and reviewed from low to high level. There's no way a nigh on 10% discrepancy could slip through. I just don't buy it
Soldato
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bet he is
only a nikon employee will say such a thing.
does anyone actually believe the reasoning behind a price misprint LOL
A 'stroudy' double agent who likely talks like a farmer? .. Nah...
Soldato
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Unless Nikon are completely inept there will be months and months of sales calcs and profit forecasts carried out and reviewed from low to high level. There's no way a nigh on 10% discrepancy could slip through. I just don't buy it
Me to, it's blindingly obvious Nikon are pulling a fast one. It's not likely Carole in accounts made a whoopsie that was left unchecked on a release this important, and for so long...
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Unless Nikon are completely inept there will be months and months of sales calcs and profit forecasts carried out and reviewed from low to high level. There's no way a nigh on 10% discrepancy could slip through. I just don't buy it
I disagree at the end of the day and I have a fair amount of insight into how this works so I think I'm right.
I work for a company which sells it's products and services globally and I know first hand how much trouble it is ensuring no mistakes are made. We are paranoid about exchange rate freshness, tax calculations and the like and even so we loose a notable chunk of cash every year in slip ups. We have some serious automated analysis for anomalies and report weekly but we've missed mistakes for a couple of weeks before. I would assume that Nikon don't have our levels of central control or systems integration (we're a technology company, our data mining and analysis is in a different league).
Basically, my experience tells me the mistake is plausible - if the mistake was made initially it'd be next to impossible to spot a mistake in one countries pricing before you started actually selling (doubly difficult for preorders where the accounting is theoretical until the physical product turns up) then after you did you'd need to wait for reporting from resellers, then reporting to head office and somebody to pick it up (and it's grunt work running the numbers so it'd be somebody junior, so it'd need to go a few levels up the chain and be rerun before it got flagged as a real issue).
Given that, a couple of weeks after presales started seems a pretty quick spot to me - we're paranoid about it happening and are in a better position than Nikon (no resellers to worry about, all accounting centralised so no country reporting etc) and we've missed bigger mistakes for longer.
There's a degree of ineptitude as most of these mistakes are made during the lifecycle with price changes and tax changes etc rather than during initial pricing.
But it's easy for it to go unnoticed in projections before sale, it's a spreadsheet full of fairly abstract numbers somebody is looking at, a 10% error easily disappears in there.
Big companies regularly loose lots of money on stuff like this because everybody thinks somebody else will know about it and it takes time to get picked up as a mistake as a result.
Anyway, my experience is it's a plausible mistake and there's no reason to lie about it if it is a price rise.
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As outlined above, it really is likely. Big companies have horrid processes, small companies are actually better off because people know what's going on, have more personal responsibility and generally less complex problems. At the end of the day, a few fairly junior people have probably been working 10 hour days producing the financials for the release. It's a huge quantity of numbers and completely abstract for them, to make a single mistake affecting one country is child's play, these things aren't checked that much and the people doing are just human.
I know who does this work and how much checking goes into it in the companies I work for - it's somebody a few years out of uni in product management who has a heavy night every so often and makes the odd mistake and doesn't care too much because they're getting £30k a year in a big company and somebody else will catch the mistake. Only they don't.
And it's one (small) country. You think anybody at head office in Japan spent more than 30 seconds giving the UK numbers a second glance before they moved onto the bigger markets?
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I'd add, as a last point on this subject, that I'm not saying they haven't reacted to the market. I'm saying there's sod all evidence for the theory that they have currently and doing so in one country so soon after launch and lying about the reason seems unlikely. A
If they do it elsewhere too then that'd be a different matter.
If they do it elsewhere too then that'd be a different matter.
You're over thinking it, this is a structured launch of a new product globally and the RRP that is set. I'm sorry but any capable company will notice a 10% error in financial projections. It's not rocket science and people are employed to look after this, especially in a company as large as Nikon.
We'll have to agree to disagree on this one
We'll have to agree to disagree on this one
You're over thinking it, this is a structured launch of a new product globally and the RRP that is set. I'm sorry but any capable company will notice a 10% error in financial projections. It's not rocket science and people are employed to look after this, especially in a company as large as Nikon.
We'll have to agree to disagree on this one
Why wasn't the price increased in other countries then? The D800 is a lot cheaper than the 5Dmkiii in the US and indeed most countries, the US market is much larger than the UK so getting the right RRP even more important. Yet there was no price change there or elsewhere. If Nikon wanted to increase profits after seeing official canon 5dmk3 price and specs then they would have done well to to do that gloabbly, or in at least the biggest market.
As Brs eludes to, setting global RRP is quite difficult. There is fluctuating exchange rates, import duty, VAT ( which has changed in the uk a few times recently), warranty differences and maret adjustments. Getting one of these wrong will result in t wrong RRP.
Maybe Nikon UK dd increases prices to increase profits, maybe there were was an error made. Impossible for us to know. At the en of the day theNikon cameras will still be cheaper than Canon's counterparts and for the most art better cameras (although we don't know much about the canon 1dx)
The price is already a lot closer in the USA, it's not much cheaper at all. Rumours are that other European countries will see a rise next week. Nikon dropped the ball on pricing and are now re-positioning. If Nikon are cheaper and better, what's the missing piece of the puzzle that keeps them where they are with regards to market share?
When you have a significant presence in a country such as Nikon UK, setting prices should not be difficult at all.
When you have a significant presence in a country such as Nikon UK, setting prices should not be difficult at all.
brs will be pleased to hear ( or not ) that amazon france have now raised price so its definitely not uk error - just extortion to me. If they had raised price on all sales after pre-orders they wouldn't have a problem but screwing the ones who ordered straight after announcement is plain stupid.
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Most definitely considering a mistake like this could cost tens of millions.
However as other Euro countries are rumoured to be increasing prices, it's extremely unlikely it was a genuine 'error', unless you count the underestimation of demand and available supply an 'error'...
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Man of Honour
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That proves absolutely nothing, if Nikon France announce increased RRPs that proves something but amazon increasing prices proves nothing, they're completely unrelated and have highly sophisticated systems for setting price points, amazon prices change dozens of times a month without manufacturer RRP changing, they're highly adaptive to demand, an advantage of being a massive reseller...
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I think you've got far too high an opinion of these companies process and competence, these mistakes do happen all the time and do cost millions. But because you're talking 10% on a product with a 30%+ margin it gets lost in the noise.
The entirety of Europe only accounts for about 30% of DSLR sales worldwide, if the UK accounts for even 20% of that (it doesn't) then that's 6%, a 10% pricing error would cost them just 0.6% of the worldwide revenue for the time until it was detected. Given it took about 3 weeks and there are 52 weeks in a year that's about 1/17th (assuming consistent sales, which isn't strictly accurate but numerically actually usually works out the same). That gives you 0.03% of yearly revenue for the camera.
That's already a 'who cares' figure on it's own. Nikon are projected to make about £7bn this year (or more accurately 925bn Yen), even if they made this error on *every* product in the UK it would cost them relatively little (I distrust my initial maths here on exactly how much). So your correct in saying it would cost tens of millions, just wrong in thinking that matters. Big business looses and wastes vast quantities of cash, that's a universal constant. Unless you have experience of international sales you'd like to share with us...
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