The new Nikon D90 has just been released in the U.S., but we're still waiting our turn up in Canada. I snapped a few thousand pics on a recent family vacation, and was going through camera withdrawal after someone broke into our car and stole my D80. The D90 has a few more megapixels, and a huge screen, but the two breakthrough features are liveview (so you can use the screen as your viewfinder, like a point and shoot camera), and video.
Rather than wait, I decided that I needed one right away. It just so happened that I also needed to meet a few companies in the valley earlier this week, so now, I'm the proud owner of a Nikon D90 (one of just a lucky few in Canada, for another week or so).
The camera feels and functions pretty much the same way as the D80. It shoots amazing videos, but probably won't be replacing your camcorder anytime soon. You see, while you can shoot video with any of your favorite lenses, autofocus is disabled during the capture process. It's great for point-at-one-spot-and-shoot videos, but if you pan the camera and require re-focusing, you'll be doing it manually. Also, it has maximum file limit of 2GB, which means you can only capture 5 minutes at full HD resolution (but obviously more at lower resolutions).
Here's a video shot from the D90, on the plane taking off from SFO.
Posted by email from Patrick's posterous
By the way, I created this post from my email program, with the help of Posterous. I attached the 46Mb file, wrote the headline in the subject field, and typed the entry into the body. Then, I sent the the email to post@posterous.com, and Posterous took over from there. Check out the original posterous page, where the video was embedded inline, automatically. I may never use the Typepad UI again.
For those of you who can't sent 46Mb files through email, check out Loa PowerTools - a great little email utility that solves almost all the problems you encounter when sending emails. I've been using it for the last few months, and have yet to encounter a network where I could not send email.
Looks awesome!
Posted by: John Bristowe | September 17, 2008 at 03:59 PM
Nice to see some real footage (rather than the nikon demos). Does it have a microphone or are you stuck with video only?
-- Colin, it does have sound - check out patricklor.posterous.com and you'll see a streaming version of the video.
Posted by: Colin | September 17, 2008 at 09:13 PM