Nikon D90

The D90 also provides a monochrome LCD display on the top right, with a tremendous amount of information – everything from aperture setting and shutter speed to whether or not the camera is set to “beep” when auto focus is achieved – crammed into an inch and a half screen.



Live View
There’s good news and bad news on the Live View front when shooting with the D90.

On the plus side, the live on-screen display is radically improved over the slow, stuttering performance we experienced when reviewing the Nikon D700. Panning the D90 around quickly produced no noticeable visual flaws. The on-screen image is bright and sharp, and brightness can be adjusted to seven different levels. And Live View mode can be triggered by pressing a single
button, as opposed to the mode dial system used on the D700.

Looking at Live View, then, is fine. Shooting with Live View, on the other hand, still has its peculiarities. For starters,  functions you’d ordinarily use when shooting through the viewfinder are locked out in Live View. You can’t change the ISO setting or image quality setting, for example. You’ll see a photo you’ve just taken displayed on-screen for a few seconds after the shot, as usual, but
when it times out, you can’t bring it back – pressing Play brings up the screen brightness adjustment control.


The most problematic aspect of shooting in Live View, though, is auto focus performance. In Live View mode, the camera uses a contrast detection auto focus system, based on the information on the image sensor, rather than the usual phase detection system used when shooting through the viewfinder. The problem is that contrast detection, as implemented here at least, is s-l-o-w. It takes
roughly a second and a half to achieve focus, cranking the lens out past the right point, then back in again. That may not sound like much time, but compared to the effectively instantaneous focus achieved with standard viewfinder shooting, it’s excruciating. You certainly can’t use Live View for shooting anything moving quickly, like a child playing or a moving car. Inanimate
objects, on the other hand, are ideally suited to this approach.

Interestingly, contrast detection auto focus doesn’t have to be this pokey. We recently shot with a pre-production sample of the upcoming Panasonic Lumix G1, a Micro Four Thirds camera with interchangeable lenses that sacrifices the SLR mirror-flipping system for the sake of a smaller camera, relying on Live View for all framing and focusing. On the G1, auto focus was nearly as snappy as the traditional SLR performance – it certainly didn’t slow down our shooting in any noticeable way. We’ve seen the future of Live View. Unfortunately, it wasn’t on the D90.

Flash (8.25)
The D90 includes both a hot shoe for attaching external flash units and a built-in pop-up flash. In Auto or custom preset modes, the flash pops up automatically when lighting conditions require it. In other modes, it’s triggered by a small button to the left of the viewfinder hump, which also allows flash intensity adjustments when held down. When opened, the center of the flash sits approximately 3 inches above the center of the lens, a decent clearance that will avoid shadows cast by most lenses and minimize red-eye.

According to Nikon, the built-in flash has a guide number of 12/39, 13/43 at ISO 100. The flash intensity can be adjusted from -3 to +1 EV in increments of 1/3 or ½ EV. Flash bracketing is also available, shooting two or three frames in steps of 1/3, ½, 2/3, 1 or 2 EV, with the built-in flash or an external unit. The fastest flash synch speed is 1/200 second.

The flash can be set for red-eye reduction, slow sync (for capturing backgrounds in night scenes) and rear-curtain sync (creating a stream of light behind moving subjects). It can also be used in Commander mode as a master flash, wirelessly controlling compatible Nikon external flash units in up to two groups.

Lens Mount (10.50)
For many photographers, half the point of buying a Nikon camera is the ability to mount Nikon lenses, which come in pretty much any configuration your photographic imagination can conjure up. For maximum compatibility, Nikon recommends using CPU lenses, which have the appropriate electronic contacts to work with the D90’s auto focus and metering systems. However, a wide variety of non-CPU lenses can be used with this body, generally with manual focusing. While the specific lens-by-lens compatibility status is too lengthy to detail here, the information is available at the Nikon web site.

While several other SLR manufacturers have integrated sensor-shift image stabilization technology into their camera bodies, Nikon continues to rely on the VR optical image stabilization built into some, but not all, of its lenses.