Nikon D90 kit review

Nikon's D80 was an extremely capable camera, but it wasn't packed with flashy features.

Its successor, the D90, scores highly on both counts. It maintains the D80's superb image quality, but adds a couple of extra megapixels, has the best controls this side of £1,000, and comes with lots of exciting extras.

This is the first Nikon digital SLR we've seen that includes live view, so you can compose shots on the LCD screen. As usual, autofocus is slow in this mode, but accurate manual focusing is easy thanks to a digital magnify function. The preview image responds to white balance and exposure compensation settings, but sadly not to manual exposure or depth of field. Even so, live view looks great; this is partly due to the 3in screen with its 920,000-pixel resolution, which is way beyond the 230,000 pixels offered by competing cameras. Another first at this price is an HDMI socket, which is capable of 1080i output. It's great for viewing shots on an HDTV, and also extremely useful for live previews in a studio situation. The onscreen text and graphics are blocky, but the image is packed with detail.

The presence of live view heralds a first for a digital SLR camera: video capture. It's recorded at 1,280x720 pixels at a film-like 24fps. The large sensor means noise is barely visible, even in low light. Automatic exposure is a bit bumpy and continuous autofocus is unavailable during shooting, but it's possible to adjust focus manually. Sound is recorded in mono at a lowly 11kHz, in common with most still cameras, but the microphone is reasonably high quality and the results aren't too much of a letdown. Overall, the video mode works well and will be a big draw for those upgrading from a compact digital camera.

Another impressive feature is the automatic removal of chromatic aberrations. These occur when the red, green and blue elements of a picture don't line up perfectly, usually at high contrast edges. On the D90, the problem appears to be banished. However, this processing isn't available when shooting in RAW mode and it cannot be applied with the bundled RAW-processing software.

Along with its exciting extra features, the D90 gets the basics right. Performance is excellent, with fast autofocus and a 4.5fps continuous mode. We never felt that the camera kept us waiting during testing. Plenty of buttons and the dual command dials make adjusting key settings intuitive and quick. Our only grumble was that some of the buttons switched to their playback functions during instant review, so we had to get used to half-pressing the shutter release to override the instant review when we wanted to adjust a setting directly after shooting. The menus include a massive array of options, but are well organised and include sensible defaults.

The D90 is available body-only for £595, but the 18-105mm kit lens is an excellent first lens with which to pair it. Focus was sharp into the corners of the image, lens distortion was at a minimum, and its optical stabilisation performed astonishingly well.

Image quality is a notch up from that of the excellent D80. Noise is insignificant at ISO 800, unobtrusive at ISO 1600 and far from disastrous at the top setting, equivalent to ISO 6400. The configurable automatic ISO mode is great for casual snapping with confidence. JPEG output is balanced and flattering, although sharpening is mild compared to Canon's SLR cameras. However, raising the sharpening setting produced photos with crisper detail.