Bidford on Avon, GB
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It all comes down to Nikon's heritage. With nearly 50 years since the F-mount came out, a lot of rationalisation has already gone on. The F1, F2, F3 were big bodied manual focus cameras. The F4, F5 and F6 were pro auto-focus cameras. The FM series were small bodied manual focus cameras. Nikon went through a wild series of different monikers for its consumer film cameras, but, as digital was kicking off, they had the F80 which was really a consumer camera, and the F100 which was adopted by many pros. Initially there were no consumer dSLRs, as the price was too high, so they stuck with the x00 moniker for F100 style cameras (although, in fact, the body of the D100 was more like the body of the F80), and x for large body pro cameras. As they already had a history of x0 consumer cameras, they stuck with that when they introduced the D70, as it chimed nicely with the F80.
Nikon could have gone with letter number combinations, like the FM2, FM3a, etc, but chose to stick with D for the digital series. This, at least, is a rationalisation of earlier systems. They could have called the D700 the D3000, but that would have probably looked very old fashioned (remember in the '90s when loads of things were called the '2000', and then followed by '3000', '4000', etc?). If they'd called it the D400, then that would have created an instant market expectation of the imminent release of the D4, and would also have told everyone that the D300 is obsolete, which it isn't.
Faced with so many intractables, D700 doesn't sound like a bad choice. M A R T I N • T U R N E R
http://art.martinturner.org.uk
http://www.martinturner.org.uk
Nikonians membership: my most important photographic investment, after the camera
My Nikonians blog, Learning from the Portrait Masters, http://blog.nikonians.org/martin_turner/
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