Hands-On With the First Digital SLR/HD Video Camera

I’m not a big fan of Live View and prefer to use the optical viewfinder, rather than the LCD, for composing and shooting. But Nikon makes it one-touch easy to activate Live View. Autofocus works in this mode for still images, which might motivate me to use it more often. But more important, Live View—which flips the mirror up and holds it open (normally, the mirror flips up just long enough for a picture to be snapped)—makes video capture possible.

The D90 offers three flavors of video: D-Movie (high-definition, 1,280 by 720 pixels at 24fps), VGA and QVGA. D-Movie’s 24-frames-per-second rate (versus standard video cameras’ 30fps) is designed to give video a “cinematic” cadence, similar to what you see on the big screen. I liked the effect, but for many people, it may be hard to tell the difference between this and the regular 30fps video rate. Thanks to the large sensor, overall quality, including in low light, is very good, with smooth transitions, accurate colors and generally even exposures.

Shooting video on the D90 offers a number of exciting benefits. You can adjust settings, such as choosing a Picture Control that lets you customize features like sharpness, contrast and color saturation. You need to set these before you start shooting, however; you can’t tweak them once you’re rolling. And you have the benefit of using a wide variety of lenses. One drawback: Autofocus isn’t available in movie mode, so hone your manual-focus skills. Zooming is also manual, and doing both, while trying to hold the camera steady, is a challenge (unless the camera is on a tripod). Fortunately, Nikon’s image-stabilizing VR lenses work in video mode to help compensate for the difficulty of holding the camera steady.

A wide-angle lens provides the broadest depth of field, so more of the picture is in focus, making it less important to manually adjust the lens. But you can get some interesting effects with other lenses. A telephoto lens, for example, will give you a shallow depth of field, blurring out everything but your main subject.

HD video is limited to a maximum of five minutes at a time to avoid overheating the sensor, but that’s plenty of time for grabbing a clip. (Additionally, Live View—which can also cause the sensor to overheat—is limited to about one hour of continuous use.) The camera will automatically shut down if the sensor gets too hot, although you’ll get a 30-second countdown warning before that happens. The camera can capture VGA and QVGA clips of up to 20 minutes.

Between the weight of the camera and lens and having to use manual focus and zoom, shooting video with the D90 is more challenging than capturing clips with a compact camera. But we expect this process to get better on later cameras, and we expect more SLRs to have video capability in the future. So kudos to Nikon for being the first.