Word on the prismatic, hinged mirror streets of camera-land suggest that NIkon is preparing to launch "new products" for Spring. Rightful speculation made after a press invite was purportedly sent to a variety of photog publications announcing an April 14th launch event. Expectations vary widely as to what will be announced including a new entry-level D60-followup with 720p video on up to a D400 with 16 megapixel Sony CMOS. We even have the dubious photo above showing a Nikon with articulating display taken by a jockey riding a humor forum who claims to have been traveling "somewhere in Eastern Europe and stumbled across a commercial shoot for Nikon." Sure, that's believable. Fortunately, we're just over a week away from knowing for sure.

Update: Well, well, what's this... we just received a big batch of spy shots that look authentic enough and clearly show what looks like a low-end Nikon with articulating display.

Update 2: We just received a few more pictures as well as the detailed backstory to this Nikon with swiveling display (a first for Nikon). Seems Kevin, a film student, was smitten by the Arriflex 235 435 motion picture camera used to film the commercial in Dubrovnik, Croatia yesterday. It wasn't until later, when he was reviewing the pics from the day, that he realized "that the subject of the commercial was the yet to be announced Nikon 500(0?)." Looks like a legit and incredibly fortunate find to us.

[Thanks, Kevin]

The kids at Photography Blog have finally got their hands on that Ricoh CX1 that won our respect not too long ago, and they've been cool enough to post a review online. The camera, the reviewer said, begins where the ol' R10 left off, throwing features like multi-pattern auto white balance, multi-target auto focus, and 4fps continuous shooting speed into the mix, making this "the best Ricoh point-and-shoot yet." That said, it can't all be groovy -- the review goes on to cite the camera's "bog-standard" 640 x 480 / 30fps video and rudimentary face detection as "nothing to write home about." Image quality -- often a deal-breaker for this company -- has greatly improved, with a new 9 megapixel CMOS sensor sporting "a now usable ISO range of 80-800." Of course, the big news is the camera's high dynamic range. DR mode is, for the most part, "radical and very effective." But there's much more to it -- hit that read link for all the gory details.

Ready for some new terminology? Good, try on "3MOS" -- Panasonic's newest sensor adaptation which, judging by machine translated text, is a trio sensors capturing twice the light of a single CMOS of the same 1/6-inch size. Think 3CCD applied to CMOS sensors. The result is said to be superior image quality and impressive low-light recording capability -- twice the sensitivity of its own 3CCD camcorders thanks to what Panny calls its new "heavy lifting iA" enabling them to shoot in a mere 2 lux of available lighting. That's just a glimpse at what you'll find inside the solid state HDC-SD100 (supporting up to 32GB of SDHC) and the HDC-HS100 hybrid offering both SDHC and a 60GB hard disk for storage. These 1080i AVCHD camcorders also features Panasonic's improved optical image stabilization, a 12x optical zoom, 5.1-surround mic, and HDMI-out.The ¥130,000 (about $1,205) SD100 and ¥150,000 (about $1,390) HS100 should hit the Japanese retail block on July 12th.

Update: English press release now available.