Report: Nikon in early development stages for new mirrorless system cameras

Mirrorless cameras are grabbing all of the headlines these days and for years, photographers have been wondering when Nikon may come to market with a serious mirrorless camera. Nikon, like Canon, has long been trying to avoid the inevitable regarding mirrorless cameras — despite pushing its ‘V’ series of small-sensor mirrorless cameras.

Well, Canon has come to market with its first serious mirrorless camera in the EOS M5 and now reports out of Japan are indicating Nikon has plans to launch a serious mirrorless camera line of its own as well. The news comes from Yahoo Japan, in which representatives from Nikon say that they will be launching multiple mirrorless system cameras in the future.

What the comment and report do not indicate is when these mirrorless cameras may be from coming, as well as what sort of sensor format they will be. Some speculated that Nikon may try and take on Sony and come to market with its own full-frame mirrorless lineup, but there is no hard evidence of that at this point.

What does seem clear is that due to its well-publicized financial troubles, Nikon has seemingly opened its mind to something that many thought would never come. It will be interesting to see if it will take a similar route to Canon, launching a capable but inferior APS-C camera to its DSLR lineup, or if it goes the Sony route and launches a competitive full-frame camera that can truly take on Sony’s A7 lineup.

The comment from Nikon just notes the mirrorless cameras are in the ‘early stages’ of development. So we can safely assume we likely won’t be hearing about any announcements this year. Regardless, the other mirrorless companies and the greater photography industry as a whole will no doubt be interested to see what comes of this.