30 Years Later: The Nikon N90s

In 1994, I remember feeling on top of the world. A few years earlier, our family had just settled into a big suburban tract home in Phoenix, Arizona. I had a good job and several big raises had found their way into my bank account. I finally had some time and the money to pick up on a photography hobby that I had set aside to concentrate on career and family. I started buying copies of Popular Photography and Shutterbug magazines at the local bookstore and spending some lunch hours at a great little camera store in Tempe called Lewis Camera Exchange. I had drooled over Nikon cameras since I was a teenager but was never able to afford one. In 1994, Nikon’s pro camera was the F4, but its retail price was over $2500 at the time and well out of my budget. One day while I was at Lewis admiring the F4, the shop’s owner suggested the new N90s. Autofocus was still a technical marvel at the time and I remember being amazed at how quickly the N90s automatically focused on various subjects in the store. The camera only has one autofocus sensor, but it’s a very good one. Nikon’s sales brochure at the time called the N90s “Fast and Accurate.”

The price of the N90s as I recall was around $1100 with the Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 AF-D kit lens. Even at less than half the cost of the F4, that amount was still a big stretch for a young father. I brought home the sales brochure and read it so many times the pages became dog eared. After much careful thought and so many repeated trips to Lewis Camera Exchange that I feared I was becoming a pest, I bought my first ever Nikon.

The N90s inspired me to fully embrace photography. Over the next few years, I converted a third stall in my garage into my dream darkroom with a proper darkroom sink, an Omega Pro-Lab enlarger and even a sound system for late night printing sessions. Film was cheap in those days and the N90s went everywhere with me.

My photographic bliss and any sort of bliss at all for that matter would soon end. At the end of the decade, my marriage would fall terribly to pieces and the N90s and the rest of my gear would be casualties of divorce. I wouldn’t pick up a camera again until 2010.

I hadn’t really given the N90s much thought over the years until one morning, I got one of those emails from eBay that lets you know that one of the sellers you follow has some cool stuff and you should go spend some money with them. I have done business many times with Joshua Cohen at Victory Camera in Colorado. He’s an honest seller with great gear. Joshua’s feed that day contained a very nice, hardly used Nikon N90s with its original box and manuals. Seeing that box brought me back to Lewis Camera Exchange and nostalgia got the best of me. For around a hundred bucks, I bought the N90s.

It’s strange holding a camera in your hands again for the first time in 30 years. In 1994, the N90s was Nikon’s newest, best , fastest and most expensive advanced amateur camera of all time. It was a marvel. In 2024, it felt like many cameras I have tried from the 1990s; big, plastic-covered techno-blobs.

The N90s and some of the same era Canon and Minolta cameras have flown well under the radar of film photography buffs because they don’t look retro enough. But under all of that plastic is a very powerful photographic tool. The N90s offers three metering modes; spot, center-weighted and 3D Matrix Metering with Nikkor AF-D lenses. I recall at the time that 3D metering gave the N90s awesome fill flash capability with Nikon Speedlights. The camera also offers a variety of exposure control methods including manual, shutter-priority auto, aperture-priority auto and fully automatic Program mode. In Program mode, there are seven different pre-programmed operations for different picture-taking situations; Program-Portrait, Program-Portrait with Red Eye Reduction, Program-Hyperfocal, Program-Landscape, Program-Silhouette, Program-Sport and Program-Close Up. If you read reviews about the N90s, almost everyone agrees that the metering system inside the N90s will take everything most photographers can throw at it. The camera has shutter speeds up to 1/8000th of a second and the motor drive will advance the film at just over 4 frames per second.

A strange thing about cameras from this era is that Nikon and other manufacturers used some sort of grippy rubber coating that, over time, begins to get sticky. The N90s has this coating on the back film door and mine was just beginning to have that gooey feeling. There are a number of different methods to get rid of the goo but I used 70% isopropyl alcohol, a micro-fiber cloth and some elbow grease. It tool about an hour to remove the sticky and expose the nice smooth plastic underneath.

Back of the N90s after sticky goo removal

I took the N90s for a test drive during a recent trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. I mounted my 85mm F/1.8 Nikkor AF-D lens (a decision I would later regret) and brought along a few rolls of Fuji Acros II film. Here are some pictures I made.

After spending a day shooting the N90s, I remember all of the reasons it inspired me so much when I owned my first one. Film loading is a snap. Open the door, insert the cartridge, pull the leader over to the red stripe, close the back, press the shutter. The film automatically winds itself on and advances to the first frame. In Program mode, this camera does all of the heavy lifting allowing you to concentrate on subject matter rather than fiddling with exposure. The viewfinder is big and bright and everything you need to know about what the camera is doing is displayed in a bright green LCD along the bottom of the frame. The autofocus isn’t fast by today’s standards, but for me it was just fine. A good comfortable strap is a necessity with the N90s as it’s a heavy camera. The fact that it is powered by AA batteries means you can easily find batteries if you need them out in the field. I am not sure what possessed me to bring just the 85mm lens with me. With Santa Fe’s narrow streets, a wider lens would have opened up so many more picture opportunities for me, but I had fun.

As I write this post, there are Nikon N90s cameras on eBay for as little as $25. Pristine ones for $75. Under a hundred bucks for what once was Nikon’s most advanced and most expensive advanced amateur cameras! I think it is one of analog photography’s best kept secrets.

Photography has been part of my life, with starts and stops, for over 50 years. It is difficult for me to be totally clinical about this camera because it helped rekindle my passion for photography at a certain part of my life but also reminds me of one of my darkest periods. Indeed…the best of times and the worst of times.