Nikon F90 (N90)

A press photographer in 1993 is working a city council meeting on deadline, and the body in his hands is winding film at about three and a half frames a second while a little screwdriver motor inside it racks an 80-200 into focus. That sound, the high whir of the in-body AF motor driving the lens through a mechanical coupling, is the F90. Nikon called it the N90 in the United States. It was the camera that finally made autofocus feel professional instead of like a gimmick bolted onto a manual body.

The 3D Matrix meter is the headline, and it earns it. Eight silicon segments read the frame, and when you mount a D-type lens the meter folds in focus distance, which is genuinely clever for backlit work where older matrix systems would blow out a face. You also get center-weighted and a real spot that reads the inner circle in the finder. The viewfinder itself is good, bright, about 92 percent coverage, 0.78x magnification, and a long eyepoint that glasses wearers will appreciate. The shutter is electromagnetic and vertical, 30 seconds out to about 1/8000, with flash sync at 1/250. Film loading is the modern kind: drop the cassette, pull the leader to a mark, close the back, and the motor does the rest.

Handling is where it splits opinion. The body is big and plasticky in a way that 1992 thought was the future, with a deep grip and a command dial under your thumb. It runs on four AA cells and it is hungry, especially if you lean on the autofocus, so you carry spares. The autofocus is single-point and, by today's standard, slow to hunt in low contrast. Match it with an AF-D zoom and a flash and it will outpace anything you could focus by hand at a wedding reception.

Here is the honest weakness, and it is the one that scares people off. Nikon used a sticky rubberized coating on the rear door, and three decades on it turns to glue. Almost every F90 you find has a tacky back that needs a wipe-down with alcohol. The electronics themselves are durable, the optional data back is the part most likely to show its age, and a clean copy is worth seeking out over a cheap gummy one.

Today the F90 is one of the best film bargains going. It sits a clear step below the F100 that people actually cross-shop, and well below the F5, yet it gives you Nikon's mature matrix metering and full lens compatibility for the price of a nice dinner. Students moving up to autofocus tend to land here, and so do event shooters who already own a drawer of AF Nikkors and refuse to pay F100 money to use them.

One metering habit pays off here. The matrix meter is smart but it still averages, and a stage spotlight or a snowfield will fool it. When the scene is high contrast, take an incident or spot reading with the Zone Light Meter app, decide which zone you want the shadows to fall on, and dial that into manual or as exposure compensation. You keep the autofocus speed and stop letting the body guess on the exposures that matter.