The Nikon D80 Replacement...
August 5--The D80 is now the granddad in Nikon's DSLR lineup. On a specification level, the D80 is missing a lot of check marks that the competition can now boast about in their marketing, and the fact that we're now almost exactly two years into the D80's life seems unusual given how fast the other Nikon consumer models iterated.

Well, that's about to end. The replacement for the D80 will be called the D90, as expected. Curiously, at a casual glance the only thing that most people will notice different from a D80 is the presence of a much bigger color LCD on the back. Indeed, most of the controls look pretty much the same (though the buttons are round now) and are in the same place on the D90 as they were on the D80. However, there are a few odds and ends that catch your notice on closer examination. On the back, for example, we now have Live View and Info buttons, and the OK button is in the middle of the direction pad. On the front there's a microphone grill next to the infrared receiver. On the side, the labels on the rubber doors reveal HDMI and GPS connectors in addition to the expected ones.

So what is a D90? Well, a 12mp, ~4.5 fps DSLR, basically. On paper those seem like modest boosts from the D80. In practice, they are a distinct notch forward in performance. The big news, however, is that Live View now has a twist that other DSLRs can't currently claim: it can record video (thus the microphone grill).

We also get a new lens for kitting with the D90: the 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6G DX VR. Modest in size (67mm filter size), this seems like a nice addition to the lineup and well targeted to the D80/D90 type of user. Essentially, this is a 28-150mm equivalent. Not truly superzoom, but a good compromise between size and reach. This new lens also plugs the VR hole Nikon had in the DX lens lineup (essentially no VR in the kit lenses if you wanted more than 55 but less than 200 at the long end).

Don't ask when or how much. To my knowledge, Nikon hasn't scheduled a press conference for product introduction yet, though they have a first quarter financial results meeting later this week. Since high-quality photos of production models appear to be circulating on the Internet, I'd guess that soon is the answer to the first question, and I wouldn't expect any big surprises (up or down from the original D80 list price) in cost.

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