Review on Nikon D5000 2 7 Inch Vari Angle Body by Mick Ohlrogge

D5000 for almost a year. I have taken several thousand pictures on a wide variety of subjects: landscape, family, sport, portrait, still life. I switched from film SLR cameras to compact digital cameras. It's a whole new world. It took me a while to get all the features and settings where I wanted them, but I've got the hang of it now. The D5000 is a compromise: it's a sensor from the D90 and a compact, digital-like user interface. This is right for me because I wanted better shots than the compact, with a wider range of lighting and action than the compact. Dynamic range was a huge improvement, eliminating the need to balance the fine line between blowing out highlights at one end and losing everything to noise at the other end (sometimes both at the same time). Folks, it doesn't work for two reasons: shutter lag and time to autofocus. I took stopwatch shots in live view and measured a shutter lag of 0.6 seconds. It's with manual focus and manual exposure, so I don't see a way to reduce it any further. The cause of the delay is that the mirror doors are lowered and raised again before the pictures are taken. It seems silly, but there's no getting around it. In any case, the delay is too long to capture the moment in street photography. Outside of live view, the shutter lag when looking through the viewfinder is very slow - too short to be measured accurately in this way. Another disadvantage of live view is the time it takes for autofocus. If the subject isn't still, you'll need to use manual focus, preset the focus (with the manual or AEL button), and most importantly, set it to AF-C mode (continuous servo autofocus) to let the camera image VOR decide that it is focused. This last part is mentioned in passing in the manual, but without it the camera will move back and forth in focus and you'll get a picture of the back of your subject as it leaves your field of view. And one more thing: since it doesn't trigger the flash remotely, it might not be what you need in a studio camera. There are several ways to get around this: Wired Flash, Pocket Wizard, etc., but you deprive yourself of full use of CLS. If you think you're serious about getting into studio photography, you probably don't want to set that limit right away. Overall, I still like the camera. It takes great pictures, is flexible and fairly easy to use, and works in many situations.