From: "leo"

Canon announces their new products a month, or two at the most, before they
appear in the market. Nikon's doing the FUD more than half a year away, like
the D70 and now the D2X.

If you have a product like the 1Ds that's currently shipping you typically
wouldn't announce the model replacing it (1Ds Mark II) until you're ready to
start shipping. Otherwise sales would dry up for the existing model. Same
deal with the 20D, they announce it and start shipping product within a couple
of weeks, and suddenly the 10D looks like yesterday's news.

If you don't have a product in that slot (if you're not competing with
yourself) then you'd announce several months early since you aren't
canibalizing your sales and also you might keep some of your base users from
jumping ship to the competition. Minolta for example announced their dSLR last
February and we still don't know the ship date or price.

So Nikon has nothing to lose by announcing the D2X before they can actually
ship it, and a lot to gain since many pros have dumped Nikon and moved to Canon
because of the 1D Mark II and 1Ds. This should slow down the defections since
the D2X looks like a very sweet camera, based on the specs and projected price.

Bill