We're feeling big rumblings out of Japan about the upcoming flagship Nikon DSLR, and the latest scuttlebutt has it called the Nikon D3. Its spec list sounds like one-upmanship of Canon's big-time flagship, the EOS-1D Mark III, but instead of 45-point autofocus of that Canon monster (which has had its problems), Nikon will go that six better with a 51-point autofocus system. The Nikon camera's also reported to have a 3-inch viewfinder. The rumor mill says there are even more improvements, too.
Instead of that rapid-fire ten frames-per-second that so impressed us with the big-time Canon DSLR (see the video here), Nikon will allegedly fall a bit short of that with "just" nine frames-per-second continuous shooting. Jeez, guys, make it 21 frames-per-second faster and you can just about shoot HDTV with this thing.
One of the dubious rumors is that this latest Nikon will have a live view viewfinder, showing you what the lens is seeing just like a point-and-shoot camera does. Although Nikon has dropped a few subtle hints about live view viewfinders coming in the future, some reps quietly said that wasn't going to happen very soon. But that was a couple of months ago when we heard that, so that live view feature for this newest Nikon is still up in the air. As far as megapixels and such, the latest guess says it'll be packing more than 12.4 megapixels. [Electronista]