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I just received a D90 for a friend this morning, and played with it for a while. I'm a Canon user (actually I've been switching back and forth a bit so can be considered a dual user of both brands) and I am really very pleased with the output. Sure, pixel peeping of real life high ISO shots shows some noise and mostly a rather heavy handed NR resulting in loss of detail, but I'm talking 100% on monitor viewing here, which of course is not representative. Now, at web size, the shots are not just brilliant, they are amazing ! (and I am assuming they would be quite excellent printed as well. OK, there IS some basic PP here, but I assure it is very slight, and applied to JPEG shots to start with, so anybody shooting RAW and using more extensive PP must be able to (even) better that...
My friend does a lot of concert photography (as an amateur) so obviously high ISO performance is what he asked me to test for, which I gladly did, because it is also what is the most critical for me personally. And since I intend to get a D700 next, I was more than willing to give the D90 a spin for him, and see how the Nikon sensors are doing these days, since I have been shooting mostly Canon for the past 2.5 years.
I'll say it twice, pixel peeping at 100% on monitor doesn't come close to those results, with definite noise and smearing of fine detail (at default settings), but with a little resizing and editing, the files clean up beautifully, and NONE of my PP work was directly meant to remove noise, just a bit of color management, levels, and sharpening, period. And just to give you a idea of where I come from and my standards for IQ, I currently shoot a 5D, and have shot several pro bodies from both brands, so I do have pretty hight expectations.
Other than IQ the D90 handles like a dream, I love the size/weight ratio and feel of the body. AF is very fast, very good, Matrix metering impressed the hell out of me, it is very consistent and smart, hard to fool (a real improvment over the last Canons I've had, as good as they may be, including the lovely XSi I hold in great respect, but whose metering tends to be a little all over the place). I LOVE the "simplified ISO" feature that allows to change ISO settings by rotating the back wheel and seing it displayed in real time, super handy.
What I did NOT like. Menus !! Gosh, there are about a billion different options on this cam and I found the menus to be very untidy, complicated, and anti intuitive, yuch, a real minus here. I've shot 15 different DSLR's in the past 5 years, including numerous Nikons, and I can pretty much find my way in any camera's menu within 5 minutes, but I have to admitt the D90 has me lost and desperately fiddling to change settings. True reason seems to be the D90 has inherited a lot of otpions from higher end models, but without the button layout to go with it :o( So get ready to read the manual a lot !
Oh, DR seems pretty good, Auto D lighting does an excellent job (I initially intended to turn it off, but now I'm hooked on it !) and Auto WB is pretty impressive as well. As always the way to set Custom WB is much easier than on the Canon's, and the AF assist works wonders. So, anything I missed from the other side ?? Well, the buttery smooth images I'm used to from my Canons, yes. But I came pretty close to it with only a few minutes of fiddling in Pictures Controls. Just used Neutral, for a flatter and less agressive contrast curve, Sharpness 4, saturation and hue +1 (to get rid of the pinkish cast on skintones).Works beautifully.
So overall I feel (having owned D100, D70 (and s), D50, D200, D80, D40, D2H) this is one of the truly good cams Nikon came up with in the digital age, for me it blows the socks off both D200/D80 (the two models I never could live with and that sent me running at Canon), it is definitely a camera I could use and love, I think. Of course, take all of this with a grain of salt as I have only shot about 70 pics over half a day, so I've left lots of things untested (servo AF, LiveView, video, just to name a few).
But overall, anyone wondering if that's the right cam to buy or good bang for the buck, I definitely thing it is.
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