D90 Update: 2 Weeks Later

If you’ve been following my experiment with a Nikon camera having been a canon user for many years, you might be wondering how things are going. Well, it’s almost been two weeks now since I decided to try out the Nikon system by getting a D90. My experience has been a little different than I expected, some things being better than I expected and some worse. Anyway, in no particular order here are some of my thoughts after the first two weeks.

Firstly, I found that I have been taking far more pictures than I have in a long time. I think half of it is because it’s basically a new gadget to play with, but there’s also the fact that the D90 is nice and light and isn’t a commitment to take out on a walk etc. I do like using it though. I’ve yet to get very frustrated with it. I get frustrated with my 5D on a regular basis. I was taking a series on for sale signs which have cropped up in the affluent part of dublin since the recession hit (more to come on that one) and I found it reacted the way I expected it to. At one stage I found myself thinking “I love this camera”. I think one of the things that has been a big big help is the fact that you can see the viewfinder display without squinting. This has made it far easier to get the shots right in camera. Yes, I know this is the sign of a pro or even someone who knows what they’re doing, but I often found that with the 5D I’d just shoot because I couldn’t see what the display was saying and and then fix it afterwards. Yes, shoddy camera technique I know, but when you’re trying to capture a fleeting moment that’s happening in front of you you don’t have time to push the camera right up against your eye and squint really hard.

I’ve also found that I’m getting far more images that I’m really happy with than I did recently with the 5D. I suspect part of this is because I was getting jaded and disillusioned with photography and having a new toy has helped. But then the images coming back seem to look much better out of the camera. They are much more vibrant for the most part. I have found that exposures are a little better most of the time but the matrix metering is not as good as I had hoped. For some weird reason it has a tendency to underexpose everything by about a third of a stop. I guess once I’ve spend a good bit of time with the camera I will learn how it responds to certain lighting and compensate accordingly. I really like that you can dial in offsets as a preference to the metering in all three of its modes, matrix, spot and center weighted. I’m not talking about exposure compensation, but an offset on all shots. It’s pretty handy, although I’m leaving it on the default for the moment.

One of the things that I’m really impressed with is the quality of the kit lens. In particular the quality of the image stabilization. It seems to work amazingly well. I took a shot yesterday at 1/30th of a second at 105mm and it was perfectly sharp, even at 100%. That’s really really good. In fact I’m starting to wonder if there was something wrong with the stabilizer on my Canon 24-105. I never got results as good with that lens. In fact I was going back through my Aperture Library earlier today trying to clean up some older projects and I was amazed how many shots were slightly blurred from camera shake or were slightly out of focus. I was never happy with that lens though. I always found the chromatic aberration at 24 mm to be ridiculous for a so called professional lens. Mind you most of the wide angle shots I’ve seen posted on flickr from the 5DII seem to have varying degrees of CA too so you have to wonder what is going on there. The 18-105 though is pretty good, although it does fall off around the edges. But results are sharp. Probably not as sharp as using a pro Nikon lens but then the camera seems to focus much better so shots do appear sharper, and the VR actually does what it’s supposed to.

There are a couple of things though that I’m not completely happy with. I love the colors straight out of the camera. They are rich and vibrant, but occasionally they look slightly artificial. My 5D would often render greens wrong, but the D90 seems to have issues with blues, particularly cyans. It’s kind of hard to explain. Everything just looks a little wrong sometimes. Now, in fairness, I have been using the auto white balance a good bit, and normally I would never do this, so perhaps that is throwing things off. Still, I took some shots the other day and I made sure I was on the right setting, and a gain colors just look a little off. The image still looked great mind you, but there was just something intangible about it. Another thing I found about it too in terms of the look of the images coming from the camera compared to the 5d is that they look delicate compared to the canon. I don’t really know how to explain what I mean by that. The 5d images were strong and solid (I know I’m not making any sense here) but the D90 seems, well… delicate. Or to put it another way, the 5D had a more film like look where as the D90 is slightly more digital looking. Perhaps it’s the finer pixel pitch on the cropped sensor, I don’t know, and it really is intangible. I’m not knocking it that much. I know the D90 was probably never going to be able to hold up to the 5D in terms of Image quality, but there is this unquantifiable quality to certain images that’s throwing me off a little. But just a little mind you. Overall I’m very impressed at how well it has stood up against the 5d

I’m beginning to get better results from the movie mode, but I still don’t use it much. You get terrible moire with fine detail and sharp edges, and everything looks very smudgy. However, in good light you can get some nice results. It’s way too limited for general use though. Noise too is an issue. Although not quite as bad as I’d first thought and reported in the last post about this, I still would have hoped for a little better. I had first written off 400 but now that I’ve done a lot more with it it doesn’t seem as bad as I’d thought. 800 is pretty bad though. Even with High ISO NR turned on it’s fairly unusable. I suppose it’s fine for snapshots etc, but for serious stuff it’s pretty bad, especially in areas of solid color.

I’ve tried submitting some pictures to iStock too, se we’ll see how that goes. I had tried two already but they were rejected. In fairness I shouldn’t have submitted them because they weren’t good enough, but I have some in the queue now that I hope will be accepted. Considering I’ve had shots from my LX2 accepted the image quality of the D90 should not be a problem, but then the iStock reviewers are a law onto themselves really. Anyway, fingers crossed.

I found myself wondering about the 5DII again this morning. It was after I got some good shots yesterday and there was that intangible delicateness that was annoying me about them I began wondering if this whole experiment was a bit of a waste of time and that perhaps I should just get the 5DII. But then I realized that I was suffering from an age old problem of “the grass is always greener on the other side”. And when I went back and looked through the images from my shoot again I realized that they weren’t that bad. I guess it’s an easy trap to fall in to. Mind you you could argue I suppose that this whole experiment is a case of the grass being greener on the other side. But then it was partially the color of grass (in this case the 5D’s luminous grass) that started me down this road in the first place. And I have to remind myself that the D90 is not really in the same league as the 5D in the first place, which got me thinking further: the fact that I am comparing a €1000 camera with a €2500 camera in the first place is a good endorsement of the D90

Anyway, I’ll add more thoughts as they come to me. I’m thinking about setting up a separate blog to catalogue this whole experiment, but I’m not sure yet. If you find this discussion useful and you want me to do a serarate blog on this, then please drop me an email or leave a comment