I keep getting asked about whether Nikon will "make just one more" DSLR or not. They are, after all, a company of habit, and the Nikon F6 was an unexpected launch using the D2h components at a time when it was clear that film SLR sales were running on darkroom fumes. That F6 went on to have an illustrious 10-year career, basically becoming the hero camera for those clinging onto their cassette cartridges of spooled film.
I can see three possible answers to the question of whether Nikon will make a hero camera for the DSLR funeral procession:
- No. The "new Nikon" likes what they're achieving with the Z System and is all in on mirrorless now.
- Yes, and it's already available: the D780 is the combo DSLR/mirrorless camera being the mating of D tech with Z tech.
- Yes, but we don't know what and when.
Things are a little different than they were in the DSLR era. Nikon went from having about half the market share of Canon at the tail end of the film world to nipping at their decimal point with digital sales, and growing rapidly. It was easy enough to dedicate a small team to bringing some of the new ideas over to one last DSLR, and that produced the F6 from D2h technology.
Today, however, Nikon is in a distant third position, carefully trying to maintain that market share while somehow growing profits, and that doesn't seem to bode well for a DSLR hero body to emerge. It's not that a hero camera wouldn't sell decently and at prices that preserve profit margin, it's that they've downsized the number of product teams they have available to create new, sophisticated cameras. Those teams are already behind the guns with now outdated Z5, Z6, Z7, and Z50 models to consider, let alone a potential full frame video/vlogging camera and anything else a Z System might need.
If I knew more about the status of F-mount lens production I'd have a more informed guess, but my best guess given the reduction in manufacturing resources available is that the handful of DSLR lenses still being produced are being made using a round robin approach (e.g. a small group that makes Lens A for a few weeks, then Lens B, etc.). Even lenses that should still have some demand in the F-mount seem to be showing up as back-ordered more often.
I was originally leaning towards "yes, we'll get one more DSLR," but in the past year I keep seeing things that would suggest to me that we won't.
That said, there's enough pride and legacy spirit remaining at Nikon that I'm sure they've discussed the possibility and perhaps even tinkered with what that would look like.
Bonus: So here's what I'd do for a hero. Much of the "not giving up DSLR" crowd is D7500, D500, D7xx, and D8xx owners (plus a few D3 to D6 folk). That suggests that if you want to pull them forward one more time, you need something highly competent. Imagine a D850 body with the Z8 sensor and processor. While you wouldn't get "more pixels" you'd get a lot of other things that haven't appeared in a DSLR to date: subject detection, HEIF, sensor VR, and more. Things like pixel shift and pre-release capture would probably have to only work in Live View mode, but that would still be things we never saw in the DSLR era from Nikon. That would be one hero of a DSLR, I think, and a good way to say goodbye to an era.
