The D800. You want this. And if you don’t, I’ll have yours because I certainly do want it.

Rumours of this 36-megapixel beast has been floating around for a couple years and Nikon has finally officially announced the new camera which comes in a couple of flavours: The D800 and the D800E. The latter is a slightly sharper version of the former. The D800E doesn’t come with the same low-pass filter as the D800 thus making its images sharper (but leaving photographers with the potential for moiré patters in their images).

It’s more than just megapixels though. I’ll leave it to the experts at dpreview.com to give you the rundown of all the features in their preview, but suffice it to say, if this camera is as good in real life as it is on paper, photographers can expect some exceptional image quality to start filling their hard drives soon.

The D800 microsite has a few examples of shots from the camera if you can’t wait to see what some people have been doing with it.

One could expect this features set to be wholly unaffordable for enthusiasts, but not so. In the US, it carries a $3,000 price tag which is pretty great considering what you’re getting. It’s a good thing because I’ll probably need a new computer to manage the massive file sizes we can expect from this camera.