Nikon remains confident in the abilities of its new flagship though, and with good reason. With the D3x it has taken an award-winning design and added a significantly higher resolution sensor, which - however you look at it - seems like solid good sense. It will take a detailed side-by-side comparison with the Sony Alpha 900 to see what difference Nikon's 'exclusive' sensor specifications make to image quality, but first impressions are extremely encouraging. I have already had the rare opportunity to shoot with a pre-production sample D3x with final firmware, and although the raw files remain inaccessible, low-compression JPEGs taken at ISO 100 at standard settings in a studio environment look stunning. We expect to receive a production sample D3x very soon, and a full test will appear in AP in early 2009.