Few hours before official worldwide unveiling of new Nikon mid-class D-SLR, Nikon D90, we managed to get sneak peak and hands-on demonstration of new DSLR. Nikon D90 will start retailing on September 19th, and its start price will be 825 € (body), or 1000 € for kit with all-new kit objective 18-105VR. These are European prices without tax, from earlier experience we estimate that US prices will be approximately 999 USD for body, and 1200 USD for kit.

Nikon D90 is similar to D300 introduced earlier this year, and among its strongest new feature is support for video recording with stereo voice. Video goes up to 1280×720 with 24 frames per second, which relies to 720p in HD world. Demonstration video, that was made using D90 is impressive, and although one minute of HD footage takes almost 100 megabytes, D90 is still offering something new and refreshing to amateur photographers and movie directors… Video clips are currently limited to length of 5 minutes, and are saved as MP4 or AVI formats.

Usage of D90 for HD videos is lacking auto-focus mechanism found in most compact video cameras and standalone camcorders, but is offering more creative freedom with depth-of-view and manual focus, something that was not seen from times of 8-mm cameras… Users can completely manually select everything (high ISO, aperture, color filters…) so D90 should be fun!

Among other new things, D90 features advanced Live-View with focusing ability, and improved 11-point auto-focus mechanism, 3-inch LCD screen with 900k pixels, HDMI output, and most of features found on D300…  Nikon's D90 is taking place of above D80, which will be discontinued by October, so expect to see some nice clearance prices for great D80 in October/November time frame…

Nikon also said that this is not the last DSLR with video function, and we expect to slowly see it in lower priced levels, and also in higher priced models - but hopefully with 1080p support…