Nikon F90X (N90s)

Canon shooters got the EOS-1, Nikon shooters got this. The early 1990s autofocus war split press rooms down the middle, and if you stayed loyal to the F mount through the awkward AF transition, the F90X was the body that finally made it feel right. It is not the F4, the pro flagship of the moment, and it never pretended to be. It was the fast, light, plastic-shelled answer for working photographers who wanted speed without lugging the brick.

Speed is the point. Nikon's CAM246 wide-area AF module, a cross-type sensor, locks and tracks better than the older AM200 unit that came before it from the brand, and for 1994 that mattered enormously. Point it at a kid running across a soccer field, hold the shutter halfway, and it stays with them. The viewfinder is bright, big enough, with the focus confirmation dot and the metering readout sitting along the bottom edge. Film loading is motorized: lay the leader to the mark, close the back, and it threads itself. Within a day you stop thinking about it.

The meter earns its keep. Nikon's matrix metering reads the frame in eight segments and compares it against a database of scenes, and it gets a backlit portrait right far more often than the center-weighted meters of the previous decade. Better still, you are not stuck with it. Flip to the true spot meter, a roughly 3mm circle at the center, and you can read a single tone off your subject. The focal-plane shutter runs from 30 seconds up to about 1/8000, with flash sync at 1/250, which was fast-glass territory in its day and still covers almost everything. The shutter is a brisk electronic clack, not the mechanical thunk of the older bodies, and the motor drive whirs the film forward at a respectable clip.

Here is the honest weakness, and every F90X owner knows it. The back. The rubberized coating on the film door degrades into a sticky tar over the decades. You buy one, you peel the goo, you wipe it down with isopropyl, and then it is fine for another twenty years. Annoying, not fatal. The other catch is total battery dependence; no power, no camera, so carry spare AA cells. It runs on four AAs in the body, and the CR123A lithium tray only comes into play if you add the optional MB-10 grip.

Today the F90X is one of the great bargains in film. It does almost everything an F100 does, the body people actually lust after, for a fraction of the price, and it takes every modern AF Nikkor you can find cheaply on the used market. Students and street shooters who want autofocus on a budget land here constantly. The one thing to know is that matrix metering, clever as it is, still averages, and it can be fooled by a stage light or a snowfield. For those scenes, switch to the body's built-in spot meter, or take a reading with the Zone Light Meter app, to place the shadows exactly where you want them and let the highlights fall where they may. That is how you turn a high-contrast frame from a gamble into a plan.