Nikon D90 review

But at lower ISO levels, quality is great even with the stock lens. It's helped considerably by Nikon's very clever automatic chromatic-aberration reduction, which is permanently activated when you're shooting JPEGs (it has no effect on RAW files). It works remarkably well and JPEGs come out with very little colour fringing, essentially giving the stock lens a software upgrade. Autofocus is noticeably faster than the D80 too, although we found the autofocus point dancing around too readily in the default AF-A mode.

Another slight downside is the menu system. With the number of new features, the pages of menus are becoming long winded. And on the software side, Nikon continues to disappoint. Although the new View NX application is better than the old Picture Project, it still falls far short of Canon's Digital Photo Professional, bundled free with its DSLRs. You do get a trial version of the Nikon Capture NX2 workflow tool, so you can at least decide if you want to shell out the £100 or so for the full version.

But the D90 really does very little wrong. Image quality is great, there are features aplenty and the stock lens is a cut above the rest. It's not cheap but you're getting an awfully capable camera for your money.

Author: David Fearon