Nikon's D90 SLR also does high-definition video

The new Nikon D90 digital SLR camera has a feature called Live View, which means you can frame pictures using the screen instead of the viewfinder. (This is, of course, dead common on snapshot cameras, but they don't have a mirror blocking the way to the sensor.) And as David Pogue points out in The New York Times, this means it's the first DSLR that can shoot video:

High-definition video, at that. Stunning, vivid, 720p, widescreen, 1280-by-720, 24-frames-per-second video, with the color and clarity that only an SLR can provide.

Evidently, it occurred to some engineer: "Hey, we're already showing a video image. Isn't that, in essence, what Live View is? Maybe we could figure out a way to record it!"



So you buy a DLR and you can do bits of hi-def video on a camera with interchangeable lenses:

With a huge telephoto lens, sitting in my bleachers seat at the Pilot Pen tennis tournament, I was suddenly filming what other people could capture only as still images. (You can see sample stills at