Nikon COOLPIX P90 Review

Nikon’s COOLPIX P90 is the company’s latest super-zoom digital camera, sporting 12.1 Megapixel resolution, a tilting 3in screen and a 24x optical range that’s equivalent to 26-624mm. Announced in February 2009, it’s the successor to the Nikon COOLPIX P80 battery and joins the increasingly competitive market for SLR-styled cameras with enormous zoom ranges.

The COOLPIX P90 may be similarly-styled to its predecessor and retains Vibration Reduction, a 1cm Macro mode and the same degree of manual exposure control, but sports upgrades in all the key departments: the sensor resolution has increased from 10.1 to 12.1 Megapixels, the screen enlarged from 2.7 to 3in and fitted to a tilting platform for greater compositional flexibility, and the zoom range increased from 18x (27-486mm) to 24x (26-624mm).



Other controls you access from the shooting menu. Most notable are an array of ISO sensitivity options. In addition to complete Auto and manual 64 through 6,400, it offers High ISO sensitivity Auto (64-1,600) and Fixed-range auto, which lets you choose one of three ranges: ISO 64-100, 64-200, or 64-400. Given how aggressive the blurring gets at ISO 200, I suggest you stick with the 64-200 modes if you're going to use the automatic mode.

In addition to matrix, center-weighted, and spot metering, the Nikon Coolpix P90 battery offers spot-AF area for use with the AF-area modes. The AF-area modes include face priority, auto, manual, and center. As usual with these technologies, I find the face-priority setting too inefficient, the auto makes undesirable choices, and the manual AF-point selection is only useful if you're shooting the same composition repeatedly. The center-focus-and-recompose approach, albeit old fashioned, is still the most efficient. Other shooting options include image size and quality, Optimize image (custom and preset settings for contrast, sharpening, and saturation), white balance, single or full-time AF, flash exposure compensation, noise reduction, and distortion control (which reduces frame size). Lack of support for raw files is a hole in the feature set, though.

That's where the 3-inch folding LCD comes into play, which we'll get to in the next section. The Coolpix P90 battery also has an electronic viewfinder, but it's a hard plastic box devoid of an eye socket-approved rubberized texture. We liked the migration of the thumb dial for easy manual adjustment and the oversized shutter button zoom toggle provided plenty of surface area. Nikon opted for a spring-loaded Flash, located directly above the lens, which is an optimal placement for an even spread of light. Surprisingly, external controls are fairly limited on the Coolpix P90, and we had to rely on menus anytime we ventured outside of a Manual mode.

The gargantuan 24x optical zoom lens is the centerpiece of this camera, extending a full three inches from the camera's body. Regardless, we think this is a sharp looking camera, and comfortable to boot. In addition to the tacky rubberized grip, the Nikon Coolpix P90 features a flared rubberized thumb rest, so comfort was never an issue. On the downside, the AV/USB port cover is flimsy and the tripod mount does not include a locking hole. Aside from those few gripes, the Nikon Coolpix P90 rocks a solid design.


At least you get a great-looking camera for your money. The P90 is the classic super-zoom shape, with a large rubber-coated handgrip, a large aluminium lens barrel and a prominent viewfinder turret with a pop-up flash. The lines of the body are clean and elegant, and the camera is very nicely proportioned. The build quality is up to Nikon's customary high standard, and although the body is made of plastic it feels strong and well made. It is, of course, only available in black.

Face detection and automatic shooting of smiling faces is available, along with a blink-proof option that takes two shots of smiling faces and then selects one in which the subject's eyes are open. High speed continuous shooting is available at reduced resolution, along with Nikon's D-Lighting feature (as an in-camera setting or in the playback menu for post processing) to enhance brightness and contrast, expanding the camera's apparent dynamic range.

Folks who are considering an ultrazoom and have studied the market might say that there are a hp pavilion dv4 battery bunch of cameras out there that offer similar features, and they'd be right. Technology marches on and it seems everyone is offering face detection this and smile detection that, so for me the critical factors tend to be performance-based: does it focus quickly, shoot quickly, produce good quality images and have ISO performance that at least compares favorably with the norms for the class? Time to pull the P90 out of the box and find out.

The start-up time from turning the Nikon Coolpix P90 on to being ready to take a photo is quick at less than 2 seconds (if the lens cap is already off), whilst zooming from the widest focal length to the longest takes around 4 seconds, understandable given the huge focal length on offer. Focusing is quick in good light and the camera achieves focus most of the time indoors or in low-light situations, helped by a powerful focus-assist lamp. The visibility, resolution and refresh rate of both the 3 inch LCD screen and the electronic viewfinder (EVF) are acceptable but not out-standing. Using the single shot mode, it takes less than a second to store a JPEG image, with a very brief LCD blackout between each image during which you can't take another shot.

In the Continuous shooting mode the P90 takes 1.4 frames per second at the highest image quality for up to 25 frames, which Nikon EN-EL5 battery is below average for this class of camera. There is also a Multi-shot 16 mode that takes 16 photos at 7.5 frames per second and arranges them into a single image, plus an Interval timer shooting mode which takes between 30 and 600 images at periods of 30 seconds to ten minutes apart, which is useful for things like astrophotography. Nikon are also heavily pushing their new Sports Continuous scene mode, which for shoots at 15fps for up to 45 frames, but it only works only when you set the resolution to 3 megapixels or lower. New for the P90 is the option to press the shutter halfway and record the moments that take place before you press the shutter fully, although unfortunately this is only available in the rather limited Sports Continuous scene mode.

The P90 is a large camera even by super-zoom standards, measuring 114 x 83 x 99 mm (W x H x D), although at only 490g including its 1100mAh Li-ion toshiba satellite a70 series battery it's a lot lighter than the 4xAA-powered rivals from Olympus, Casio and Canon. The size and lightness make the camera very pleasant to handle, and the large handgrip and rubberised thumbgrip make it comfortable and secure to hold. The camera has a wide range of external controls, but they are well positioned to fall under the thumb and forefinger and are clearly labelled in white on black.