Nikon D5000 Performance

Very good speeds for a consumer digital SLR.

Fast startup and shutdown times, fast enough that they're difficult to measure. Enabling sensor cleaning increases shutdown to 2.2 seconds, but you can cancel this at any time by pressing the shutter button or a menu button. Buffer clearing times are quite good, but depend on the image quality, size and speed of the memory card.

Mode switching times are very good, though Record-to-Play is a bit on the slow side.

Full autofocus shutter response is good at 0.276 second. Enabling the built-in flash increased full AF lag just slightly to 0.288 second: That small an increase is excellent. Letting the camera choose the autofocus point increases full AF shutter lag to 0.351 second. "Prefocusing" the camera by half-pressing and holding down the shutter button before the final exposure results in a lag time of only 0.085 second, also good. Manual focus was slower than prefocused, at 0.174 second.

Lag times in Live View mode are a lot slower, as only contrast-detect AF is supported on the D5000. Full AF in Live View required a very long 2.3 seconds on average to achieve focus, and lag varied a lot between iterations. (Contrast-detect AF needs to adjust the lens slightly out of focus first, then back in again, to be able to tell that it's achieved proper focus.) Lenses with fast focus motors seem to make only a minor difference. When prefocused, Live View shutter lag is much faster at 0.542 second, but still over 6x slower than prefocusing with the optical viewfinder.

Shot-to-shot cycle times in single-shot mode were quite fast, at 0.49 second for large/fine JPEGs, 0.52 second for RAW frames, and 0.56 second for RAW + LF JPEGs. Continuous mode speeds are also quite good, our measured speeds coming in slightly better than the camera's rated 4 frames/second in all modes, at about 4.04 frames/second. Measured buffer depths were more than 20 frames for large/fine JPEGs, 10 frames for RAW mode and 7 frames for RAW+JPEG. (Note that in our cycle-time testing we shoot a target consisting of a fine-grained digital noise pattern, designed to be very hard to compress. This gives us worst-case buffer capacity numbers: You're likely to see greater buffer capacity when shooting more normal subjects.)

The flash took about 4.7 seconds to recharge after a full-power pulse, which is a bit slow, but not surprising with the relatively small lithium-ion battery.

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

Bottom line, the Nikon D5000 is reasonably fast in just about every aspect of its operation. While it's a bit slower than the D90 overall, it improves on the D60's speed in virtually every respect, despite the increase in resolution. Continuous modes are fast enough for most moving subjects, and shutter lag and cycle times are pretty fast as well. The one exception is autofocus in Live view mode: It's definitely not a "sports" mode.

Battery
Average battery life for a lithium-ion SLR design.

The Nikon D5000 uses a custom rechargeable lithium-ion battery for power, and ships with a charger. Although battery life is okay, 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 CIPA battery-life and/or manufacturer standard test conditions.

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

Storage
The Nikon D5000 accepts SD or SDHC memory cards, and does not ship with a card.

We strongly recommend buying a large capacity SD/SDHC memory card at least a 1GB card, preferably a 4GB one, to give yourself extra space for extended outings, or when shooting RAW files and/or HD video. (Check the shopping link above, cards are really cheap these days, so no reason to skimp.)