The Nikon D90 Reviewed
Hollywood Newsroom is now Buzz Newsroom! Visit and bookmark our new site. Buzz is bigger and better, including sports, world news, gadgets and the entertainment news that you're used to. Same staff, just more stuff! Why Fark, Drudge and Huffington when you can Buzz!?If you saw it just sitting there, you’d never guess that the new Nikon D90 is a mind-blowing, game-changing camera.
It looks like any other big, black intermediate single-lens reflex camera: much more compact than a professional model, but much bigger and heavier than a pocket camera. An S.L.R. comes with a shoulder strap because it needs one.
What you get in return for looking like a tourist, of course, is the potential for absolutely stunning photos. Thanks to factors like high-quality, interchangeable lenses, a huge light sensor and high-speed circuitry that reduces shutter lag to zero, the pictures you get from an S.L.R. generally make pocket cameras’ output look like amateur hour.
The new D90, which arrives in stores next month, happens to be a superb S.L.R. At $1,000 (or $1,300 with a new 18-105 millimeter, image-stabilized lens), it’s priced neatly between the D300 (Nikon’s bigger, heavier, all-metal professional model, $1,650 online) and the intermediate D80 ($720 online), which will soon be discontinued. (These last two are body-only prices; lenses are not included.)
The specs and features sit neatly between those cameras, too. The D90 has a 12.3-megapixel CMOS sensor that measures 1.14 inches diagonally (24 by 16 millimeters), a hair smaller than on professional cameras. At start-up (or on command), the D90 gives that sensor a little shudder to shake off dust that may have entered the camera during a lens change, in that way avoiding shadowy specks in the photos.
This camera is rocket-fast, too. Autofocus is nearly instantaneous, shutter lag (the delay after the button is pressed) is zero, and you can snap 4.5 photos a second for as long as you keep the button pressed.
There are some new features: a clever calendar that lets you hunt down photos by date, right on the camera; an effect that simulates the spherical view of a fish-eye lens; a jack for an external G.P.S. receiver that is coming from Nikon (for geotagging pictures); a function that straightens off-kilter horizons; face-recognition autofocus; and so on.
- from NYTimes