Nikon, you sly dog, you: Part II

So after the past two days of digital camera releases by both Canon and Nikon, I’ve had a chance to look into both releases a bit more and muse about how they’re each going to affect the digital camera industry. To get a summary of each new release, check out DPReview.com’s "What’s New" sections. They do a great job at summarizing the new features, so here are the notables for the Canon 50D (MSRP $1,399 kit) and the notables for the Nikon D90 (MSRP $1,300 kit). My initial amazement of the Nikon D90 from yesterday has faded, but Nikon is still doing a lot to drive the industry forward.

As was the 40D to the 30D, Canon has taken the evolutionary approach, as opposed to the revolutionary approach, for the 50D. It ups the resolution of the sensor, increases high ISO performance (yet to be seen…), and deepens the buffer depth. The new screen is a 3.0" VGA resolution screen, rivalling the Nikon screens and supposedly even besting them due to more anti-reflective coatings. As for my comment on it needing weather-sealing to compete against the D300, even though it is priced to compete with the D90, it sounds like Canon worked on it. DPReview.com reports there’s "better environmental sealing" than the 40D, but there are no rubber gaskets to report of, only "tighter seals".

Any camera released these days will be an upgrade over my current 300D, and the 50D is as capable a camera as ever, but there just isn’t that much that gets me excited. There isn’t anything (like a full-frame sensor…) that is making me clamour to swipe my credit card. It’s a good camera for those buying their first camera, but with technology being the way it is these days, I’d personally wait a year and see what they release. In the meantime I’d use the money to maybe purchase a Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L…

Nikon’s offering, the Nikon D90, is no slouch either though. Aside from its movie mode, I would still consider it an incremental upgrade over the popular Nikon D80. Along with the 50D, it receives a resolution and ISO bump. It has yet to be seen if the same image processing engine, Expeed, that powered the D80 will be able to handle the tighter pixel pitch and higher max ISO; the D90 maxes out at ISO 6400 and the D80 maxed out at ISO 3200, both on boost.

Unfortunately Nikon skimped out adding more RAM to the shot buffer. The buffer still stands at 6 RAW frames, even though the frames per second rate has gone up to 4.5 from 3.0. That means that within about 1.5 seconds, the D90′s buffer will be full and about 6 seconds will have passed before the buffer is cleared. This is hard on sports shooters. There have been times when I was shooting sports where I would’ve loved a high frame rate and be able to shoot before, through, and after a play. Just shooting casually, I’ve come up against the 4 shot buffer limit of my 300D, and I know I could have shot much more than 6 frames in that sequence. Still, the 50D’s buffer of ~19 RAW images at about 6.3fps trumps the D90.

It is a trade-off for sports shooters though. On one side, you have the higher resolution and better high ISO performance of the 50D, but on the other side you have the autofocus performance of the D90, which it inherited much from the D3/D300/D700. It has 3D tracking AF and tracks using colour, and it has 11 AF points compared to the 50D’s 9 points. Either way you swing, concessions will have to be made – either shoot tighter to compensate for the lack of resolution or anticipate more to compensate for the slightly poorer focusing system.

And then there’s the movie mode…

Yesterday I was praising Nikon for their movie mode and today, I’m commending them, but the praise has left the building. It is an industry first and it is nice of them to make it 720p, but the number of limitations just keeps on increasing as I do a little more research:

• Movie clips are limited to 5 minutes in length
• No autofocus when shooting
• Mono sound from the built-in microphone. They should have at least used a stereo microphone
• The file format it will use to record the movies is Motion JPEG (MJPEG). If anyone still uses a Canon digicam, they’ll know the horrendous file sizes of those MJPEG videos
• Still pictures taken when recording video are limited to the 720p resolution the movie is being recorded in. I suspect it’s something to do with the sensor actually only recording 720p as opposed to the 12MP sensor downsizing into 720p movies

At this point, the Nikon D-Movie mode seems more like a strong gimmick. I’m sure there will be many great movies created when it comes out, as there are always great photos and videos taken with less expensive equipment, but they will be working heavily around the limitations of the D90. I think the killer of the D90 is its mono sound. I haven’t read any indication that you can plug a quality microphone into the D90 to get that stereo sound it’s lacking. So as of yet, it won’t be challenging the Canon XL2. Even though the XL2 is about $2,300 more than the D90 body, once you throw on a 20x zoom quality zoom lens and a stereo mic in, the price evens out. Until the 2nd generation movie DSLR comes out, DSLRs should stick to taking pictures and movie cameras should stick to taking movies.

On a more interesting note, I swear I was at Gasworks Park in Seattle that Saturday when I was there interviewing when they were creating test footage for the Nikon D90′s video mode! I remember seeing a bunch of videographers creating footage of BMX bikers. I could’ve had some leaks that were way ahead of the game had I a) known who the professional photographer doing the video was, b) walked in the background of the video, c) hung around closer to the shooting party, or d) had a super telephoto of my own and stalked them from afar. Oh well. It’s still cool to see that they were shooting that footage.