After consulting with a few dealers it appears that come Sunday, Nikon's pricing on the Nikon 1 bodies will be:
- J1: US$399 (rebate gets it there)
- S1: US$499
- J2: US$549
- J3: US$599
- V1: US$399 (closeout pricing)
- V2: US$849 (rebate gets it there)
Still doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Moreover, all three dealers I spoke to said the same thing: Nikon has too many stocking units (SKUs). In theory if a dealer just ordered one of each Nikon 1 SKU he'd have 25 Nikon 1 body kit boxes on his shelf. If he ordered one of each body/kit possibility, he'd have more than double that.
To put that in perspective, if a dealer were to order one of each body+kit lens SKU they'd have spent a bit over US$13,100. At Nikon's current rebate prices, they'd get US$13,300 from customers in cash buying the product, and 85% of the rebates back as a credit for future orders.
The problem is that dealers still have stock of five J1 kit SKUs, which they can now sell for US$399 and will want to sell quickly having likely held them for awhile, but Nikon wants them to stock 16 other very similar new SKUs, of which even the cheapest would look like US$100 more to a customer walking in the door (10mp J1 versus S1).
To me, this is a failure of product management. One of the many goals of product management is to make for smooth model transition. The Nikon 1 model transition doesn't look at all smooth to me, and the dealers I talk to say it is not at all smooth to them.