Sign up for the FREE Tell Membership and receive benefits that include the digital edition of Tell magazine sent straight to your inbox, product giveaways, coupons and much more!
Sign up for the FREE Tell Membership and receive benefits that include the digital edition of Tell magazine sent straight to your inbox, product giveaways, coupons and much more!
During the Great Depression (the one in the ‘30’s, not the one we may or may not be teetering upon these days), Kodak gave Americans a huge, if quiet, gift. In an age when moving pictures were a source of playfulness, escape, and aspirational glamour, the company released it’s first 8 mm home movie camera, and for decades after, families were able to create sublime silent films of their own precocious toddlers, pretty young mothers, and holiday morning mayhem.
If you were lucky enough to have had a family member who captured images on 8 mm, you already know that those movies have a classic, grainy quality which modern-day camcorders, even with their host of crash-zoom lenses and top-notch audio, have never quite touched. Though processing and film transfer were always a pricey annoyance, everyone on 8mm looked like a movie star, even if they were just walking down the front porch steps.
The new Nikon D90, the first D-SLR on the market to capture high-resolution video (24 frames per second with sound) as well as pro-grade still photographs, is a terrific reminder of our potential to document our lives cinematically. Though this double-whammy feature set is still clearly in first-generation territory, this one device’s ability to give us a full-range of stunning images, from a glowing low-light portrait to a super wide-angle 720p video clip, is enough to earn it’s lofty tag-line, “Engineered for Artistry.”
What’s simply cool about a D-SLR which captures video is that you can shoot with a wide variety of interchangeable lenses. Camcorders can’t typically pull off extreme fisheye wides or water-drop-on-the-rose macro-shots. The Nikon D90’s kit lens, a 18-105 mm can’t either, but if you beg, borrow, or rent Nikon or Nikon-compatible glass, you’ll love how Movie Mode captures and delivers your subjects in high definition to a display of your choice.
The camera’s own LCD display screen is a generous 3-inches, taking up the majority of the body’s backside. The screen will come to life with a “live video” feed (exactly what you’d see through the viewfinder, which D-SLR users still employ!) with one push of a dedicated “LV” button. Once that’s activated, hitting an ample “OK” button will start your video capture, and hitting “OK” again ceases the action. There is a 5-minute limit to each high definition movie clip (recorded on to a SD or SDHC memory card). And it’s in both live view and movie mode that the camera’s only weaknesses come out: you can’t autofocus or change the exposure while you’re shooting and the quality of recorded audio is unimpressive.
This will certainly change in the future. Major camera companies are lining up to release their own versions of a D-SLR with movie-making capability, and the competition will improve the feature’s functionality sooner than later. Canon has already announced video/audio capture in its next-gen full-frame D-SLR, the EOS 5D Mark II. That highly-awaited pro cam is hitting the market at a beefy $2699, however. The Nikon D90 body is a more accessible $999.99 (though you can already get it discounted for far less).
And let us not forget that the D90 is a masterful little (by D-SLR standards) still camera. Crank the ISO to 3200 and immortalize a dark bar, set up the burst mode (4.5 frames per second) and rule the playing fields, drop the f-stop to a low number and start moonlighting as a portraitist. With such a versatile one-unit toolkit, you’re bound to make something great.
Nikon D90
www.nikonusa.com
$999.99
(without 18-105 mm Kit Lens)
12.3 megapixels
Live View & Digital Movie Modes
ISO 200-3200
11-point Autofocus with Face Priority
Related Posts