I always aimed for the "2nd from the top" body, and so at the time the F90/N90 was the obvious choice. The camera offered basically the complete functionality of the F4, however it was revolutionary in its electronic controls based on a button+wheel mimic, LCD display and a full battery of external pro-controls, allowing virtually complete control of the exposure without taking your eye away from the very bright viewfinder, equipped with a viewfinder curtain, not a plastic cup on a strap to fiddle with, like on Canon's and newer Nikon's.
In my eyes Nikon's F5/F100 pair was worse in terms of ergonomics. I never liked controls of the F100, which I have also in a similar fashion now on my D200. The F90 was *brilliant* in its setup of controls. Recently on I also used the much later made Canon EOS-3, and aside of several technical innovations in the Canon, like the depth-automatic,
the F90 was as contemporary as it gets. The secret of ergonomics is to offer a minimal set of controls so that none will be missed, and so that none will be cluttering the body and virtually never used. F90 was close to heaven, well maybe except the bracketing,
which was amiss. D200 is a chaos of redundant often dead controls. Go figure, I call it the Downfall of the House of Nikon.
If I put the F90 vis a vis to the D200 and detest the chaos and irregularities in the D200, I envision a hypothetical D90 made on the example of the F90, and I see in my mind a perfect order, minimality and universality in controls as it might have been done in the first place by Nikon.
In all these years I took the F90 everywhere, from deep snow of Sweden and Greenland, to wet rain forest, into desert and up high to the tops of the Alps. The F90 served and it still is serving without any disruption. The LCD display is as bright and clear as it ever was, viewfinder is excellent, film advance is perfect. Lovely, unique well done device. I send it in after 10 years to Nikon for a cleaning and lub.
Regarding F90/N90 one thing always bothered me at Pbase:
We should not be separated in "US and non US images" because Nikon marketed the same camera under two names F90 and N90. Our all images should be put together, and I kept asking for this over the years, so far without any such action taken by Pbase....
PBase Server Error
ERROR: 500
NOTES: [hset] LOADING Redis is loading the dataset in memory, at /usr/local/share/perl5/Redis.pm line 268.
,
