Great semi-pro camera

My wife and I bought a Nikon D70 as our first "real" transition away from film (and we haven't looked back). We still love the camera and pull it out for all the holidays but I noticed that we didn't use it as much as we thought. When our friend's daughter got married a few weeks ago, he asked us to take some informal pictures. While my wife was using the D70 I asked her how it was going, and she said that the camera just wasn't fast enough, she felt like she was missing the moment because of the focus time and shutter lag. This is ironic, because we bought the D70 because it was so fast, at the time.

I was able to play with a D300, which is more of a pro level dSLR, but when I tried to use it for quick family shots I felt like some things were just not set correctly. The D300 reminds me of an old school race car which can perform well, if you know how to set it up. I enjoy photography but I don't do it enough to be skilled at all the various possibilities all the time.

So from this background, we started to look at new options in the digital camera field. Being previous owners of Nikon cameras we decided to look at the newest stable mate in the Nikon dSLR line, the D90. This model is situated above the entry level D60 (and soon to be released D5000) but below the pro D300. There is an excellent comparison of the D90 with the D5000 and D60 at: http://www.dpreview.com/previews/nikond5000/ it is more of a D5000 preview but it really highlights the differences of the D90 and D60. My biggest thing is the resolution of the screen on the back of the camera; the D60 has about ¼ the pixels of the D90. It is hard to describe how sharp the images look on the screen of the D90 (very sharp). The D90 has a general AUTO mode that takes care of everything and also some scene modes which favor fast action, portrait, night portrait, landscapes and macro (close up) situations. I could probably set all the things up for each scene but sometimes you just want to jump into taking pictures. Of course there are also modes which allow more control; Program, Aperture, Shutter, and full Manual. I see the D90 as the D300's little brother.

The first thing you notice about the D90 is the large 3" diagonal screen on the back. When you turn on the camera and review a shot, the next thing you notice is the amount of detail on the screen. It has 920,000 pixels, which is about 8 times the pixel count of the D70's 1.8" diagonal screen for 4 times the area. So the images have much more pixels per inch and they look very sharp.

The overall feel is very well built. There is some heft to the camera, and I like that. I used a dSLR once that was so light it felt that it was made of cheap plastic and was difficult to hold steady. There is a balance between "heavy enough" and "too heavy" and the D90 seems to be just about perfect.

The controls seem to be placed in pretty good positions. I'm sure Nikon has done lots of research and the layout has evolved over the many generations of the dSLR's in their lineup. One neat feature is the "info" button; which puts the information of the top LCD on the back screen with more information. This sounds a bit useless but sometimes you are holding the camera away from your face (say on a tripod) and it is nice to be able to see all of the settings and shot information on a larger screen.

One feature that some people will probably like is the live view mode. In this mode the mirror flips up and the back screen shows what the camera "sees". This makes the camera act like most (if not all) of the small point and shoot cameras out in the world. I find that I don't really use this mode very much. For one thing, the delay between pressing the shutter button and the shot being taken feels long and there are limited autofocus features in liveview (it uses a contrast based autofocus mode instead of the normal 11 point mode, this tends to take longer to focus), but you can use the directional pad to move the focus interest point where you want it.

The other cool thing this camera offers is a movie recording mode. I know most point and shoot cameras have this mode and it works pretty well. You have to realize that a dSLR is fundamentally different inside and it was a pretty big deal to get this feature. In fact, the D90 is the first dSLR to have this. It can record video at up to 1280x720 resolution (HD 720p) for up to 5 minutes. At a lower resolution (640x424 or 320x216) it can record for up to 20 minutes per session. This time limit appears to be an internal heat issue from what I can learn from the web. One interesting thing is that the autofocus doesn't work while recording video; you are reduced to manually adjusting focus once you start. This opens the door for some neat effects but could be limiting for action videos. I wouldn't throw away my camcorder, but being able to record video is a neat feature that lets you grab some videos you may not normally get.

This camera feels like a nice bridge for someone who knows a bit about photography but still wants to be able to fall back to auto (or some scene modes). It supports all the cool Nikon lenses, but since the sensor is not full 35mm film size there is a magnification effect (1.5X) if the lens in not a DX lens (which means it was built for the Nikon digital dSLRs). This magnification is a blessing if you like to do telephoto work since a normal 300mm lens now becomes a 450mm lens, but it is a curse if you want to shoot wide because your 20mm is now a 30mm. Luckily the kit lens that came with the camera is an 18-105mm DX lens, so you get the 18mm for family shots in the living room. (Sorry to confuse anyone on these lens numbers, there are some good articles on the web about focal length that covers this. In short; a 50mm lens has approximately the same magnification as the human eye, a shorter lens, say 18mm, pulls the view back, and a longer lens, say 100mm pushes you closer to the subject.)

The D90 takes SD cards and accepts the new high capacity cards (SDHC). If you are thinking of shooting any rapid sequence, then buy the better cards. We are using the Sandisc Ultra II 8GB card which we got at a local computer store for $20 each and they work great.
Overall we are very pleased with the camera and will update as we do more shooting with it.

Bradman