This first shot was taken with the COOLPIX P90 zoomed-out and set to its lowest 64 ISO sensitivity. The tilting monitor allowed us to easily frame this shot with the camera held-high, and the 26mm wide angle has captured a large field-of-view. The image is pretty sharp with only minimal softening in the corners and no evidence of fringing despite areas of high contrast. The crops are clean and detailed, but lacking the ultimate crispness of the best models out there. It should be noted they also already have a fair amount of sharpening applied.

Landscape: 5.28MB, Program, 1/250, f7.1, ISO 100, 4.6-110.4mm at 4.6mm (26mm equivalent)

						Another shot taken under bright light with the lens zoomed-out and the sensitivity nudged up to 100 ISO. This shot was taken at a very low angle, made easy by the P90’s tilting monitor. As above, there’s no fringing to complain about and only minimal fringing. Again though there’s a lack of crispness despite sharpening artefacts, and the nudge to 100 ISO has resulted in subtle noise textures in the sky.

Landscape: 4.69MB, Program, 1/800, f8, ISO 200, 4.6-110.4mm at 44mm (250mm equivalent)

The jump to 200 ISO has seen an increase in visible noise and a softening of edges. There’s also now evidence of coloured fringing in areas of high contrast which wasn’t apparent at wide-angle.

Focusing is quite quick under good light, but it can take a few seconds before the VR settles-down and stabilises the view by which time your subject may have waddled out of view. We grabbed the shot this time though and with the sensitivity reduced to the minimum 64 ISO, the crops are clean and detailed.

The crops of the subject are sharp, although like the sample above, there’s noise artefacts appearing in areas of flat colour or shadows, and a reduced crispness to edges.

The P90’s aperture can be opened about one stop wider at this focal length, but like all compacts, the background won’t become as blurred as with a DSLR.

We did however find superior results could be had from a few cm distant and with the lens zoomed-in to around 3x – an equivalent of 68mm here.

Zooming-in has avoided geometric distortions, but even in areas that are in focus, the 100% crops look a little soft. This is partly down to the increase to 400 ISO.

We manually set the AF mode to Face Detection, after which it locked-onto our subject.

The 400 ISO sensitivity has inevitably seen an increase in noise textures and a softening of edges, but the crops show there’s still a decent amount of detail, and noise levels are acceptable for most prints.

The camera’s VR anti-shake had no problems with a 1/16 exposure here, and in our tests offered three stops of compensation.

There’s a noticeable increase in noise levels here, along with a reduction in fine detail.

Fine for small prints, but it won’t hold up to close examination on larger prints or on-screen by pixel-peepers.

The P90 then goes onto offer 3200 and 6400 ISO options, albeit at a greatly reduced resolution of 3 Megapixels. You can see samples of them and other sensitivities in our High ISO Noise results page.