Nikon P90 Performance

About average performance for an ultrazoom digicam.

Fair times here, for a long-zoom.

Shutter response is about average at wide-angle, at 0.53s. At full telephoto, it is faster than average for a long-zoom, at 0.48s. Enabling the flash increases lag time to 0.84 second. "Prefocusing" the camera by half-pressing and holding down the shutter button before the final exposure results in a lag time of only 0.015 second, which is commendable.

Shot-to-shot cycle times are about average, at about 2.02 seconds for large/fine JPEGs, and the camera captures frames continuously at this rate. (That is, given a fast enough memory card, it doesn't have to pause every few frames to wait for the card to catch up.) Enabling functions like Active D-Lighting and Distortion Control lengthens those times. The camera's Continuous mode only captures frames at 1.39 frames per second, which is on the slow side, though the P90 does offer a Sport Continuous mode that shoots up to 11 frames per second at 3 megapixels, and up to 15 frames per second at 1,920 x 1,080 resolution.

The flash takes about 6.6 seconds to recycle, though this was difficult to measure as the camera gives no indication of flash readiness without the user repeatedly pressing the Shutter button. Our tester noted that if you sit and half-press the Shutter button waiting for the flash, the camera will indefinitely tell you the flash is charging. Thus, he had to continually half-press the Shutter button to see when the flash was charged, resulting in an untrustworthy measurement of about 6.6 seconds.

Connected to a computer or printer with USB 2.0, download speeds are very good.

Overall, the Nikon Coolpix P90's performance is about average for an ultrazoom camera, from cycle times to shutter lag to startup time. Full resolution continuous speed isn't zippy enough for fast-paced action, however the Sport Continuous modes are quite fast, if you don't mind the low resolution.

Battery
Lower than average battery life for a lithium-ion design.

The Nikon Coolpix P90 uses a custom rechargeable lithium-ion battery for power, and ships with a charger. Since battery life is modest, we recommend you pick up a spare battery and keep it freshly charged and on-hand for extended outings.

The table above shows the number of shots the camera is capable of (on a fully-charged rechargeable battery), based on Sony's standard test conditions.

(Interested readers can find an English translation of the CIPA DC-002 standards document here. (180K PDF document))

The Nikon P90 accepts SD/SDHC memory cards, and includes about 47MB of internal memory.

We strongly recommend buying a large capacity SD/SDHC. These days, 2GB cards are inexpensive, but if you plan to capture many movie clips, 4GB should be a minimum.