Lovely Oksana shows off her superfast, brand spanking new Nikon D3 photojournalist/sports camera at Ruby Skye. Will professional Canon shooters now switch brands? Yes they will.

Well, Nikon USA's digital camera dog and pony show came past San Francisco last night. We didn't see all of it, but we do have some comments and observations, after the jump.

Open the pod bay doors, Hal. The future is coming.

First, with the smaller cameras. Integrated WiFi is getting cheaper and better. With the S51c, people can wirelessly upload now and regret later. The trend lately has been to optimize point-and-shoot digicams so they can be used to easily take good photos of your friends at a party in a dark room - the main thing many people want to do. Mission accomplished.

Something else we saw was a "stop motion" feature (similar to, but different from time lapse) that uses ghosting to assist in easily making your own animated kind of movie. As in Stop Motion Pizza, for example.

Nikon Senior Technical Manager Steve Heiner talks turkey with a reporter at Nikon's Four to the Floor event. Here's some of what he said.

Now, with the larger D-SLR cameras. The full-frame D3 and the slew of recently announced new lenses are a revolution for Nikon. Even though we've become accustomed to fast zooms and fast primes on full-frame Canon cameras, we were nevertheless amazed at the bright, super-wide-angle world we saw through the D3's viewfinder at 14mm. The smaller D300 appears very nice as well.

It looks like Nikon vs. Canon will be one of the more heated competitions at the next Summer Olympics in 2008. Nikon is promising very clean images at super high ISO's. We'll see very soon how that pans out, but things look great at this point.

And of course we welcome all your good local photos, no matter how you upload them to Flickr. Tag them SFist, if you please.