Nikon D4 price hiked by £500 after pricing error

Oops. Nikon has announced that it slapped the wrong price tags on the Nikon D800 and Nikon D4 SLR cameras -- and has hiked the prices by as much as £500.

The 16-megapixel professional-level D4 now costs £5,290 instead of £4,800, an increase of £490. The 36.3-megapixel D800 now costs £2,600 instead of £2,400, and the D800E now costs £2,900 instead of £2,700.

Nikon told us that "due to a local internal systems error, the incorrect RRPs on the D800, D800E and D4 products were communicated in the UK and Irish markets at the time of announcement.

"The correct RRPs for the products should have been D4: £5289.99, D800: £2,599.99 and D800E: £2,899.99. We would like to apologise sincerely to our customers for this unfortunate mistake, which has been corrected with immediate effect. We know that there has been strong consumer interest in these products and a high level of pre-orders placed with retailers; Nikon will be honouring the original prices to retailers on all customer pre-orders placed before March 24th 2012."

That's nice of 'em.

If I was more cynical I might wonder if this "strong consumer interest" had prompted a little rethink of the price. And if I was really cynical, I might even go so far as to mention that the D4's original price was significantly cheaper than its closest rival, the Canon EOS-1D X, garnering it a lot of goodwill and positive reviews... and it's now the same price as the 1D X.

Fortunately I'm not a cynic, so I won't mention any of those things. Whatever the price, the D4 and D800 are both an awful lot of camera. Both shoot professional quality photos and high definition 1080p video -- and did we mention the D800's whopping megapixel count?

Incidentally, the difference between the D800 and the D800E is that the D800E has no anti-aliasing properties on the low-pass filter. If you don't know what that means then you probably don't want or can't afford either camera, so don't worry about it.

Honest mistake or cynical price hike? Tell us what you think in the comments or on our Facebook page.