Glass Bodies a variant-level encyclopedia of vintage lenses and cameras by iwillpat

Nikon F90

Nikon · Nikon F mount · 24×36mm on 35mm film · 1992

Also known as: Nikon N90 · Nikon N90s · Nikon F90X · Nikon F90x · ニコンF90

Variants & identification

Variant Mount Years Serial ranges Production
F90 Nikon F 1992 — No figure published
F90X Nikon F 1994–2001 — No figure published
  1. No production figure has been published for the F90 or the F90X, and no serial blocks. Nikon's product archive gives the F90X a specification table and the F90 a five-line feature list; the public database that carries Nikon serial blocks for the digital bodies still records film cameras as a section to be added.
  2. Six designations, two cameras. Wikipedia tabulates F90 and F90X as the bodies, with F90D and F90XD denoting a body supplied with the MF-25 back and F90S and F90XS one supplied with the MF-26. North America received the two bodies as N90 and N90s.
  3. Kodak built the DCS 400 series of digital SLRs on these bodies: the DCS 410 and the early DCS 420 on the N90, the later DCS 420, the DCS 460 and the NC2000 on the N90s. A DCS 460C on an N90s body was bought by NASA and flown on the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station.
  4. Wikipedia records the F90 as the first Nikon body to autofocus with AF-I and AF-S lenses, which the F-801 and F-801s cannot, and the first to support 3D TTL flash metering with D-type Nikkors. Manual AI and AI-converted lenses meter centre-weighted and spot only; AI-P lenses restore matrix metering; non-AI lenses damage the body.
  5. Nikon's product-archive pages for both versions are no longer served from imaging.nikon.com and were read through the Internet Archive.
  6. The single autofocus sensor is the limitation every reviewer lands on. Thom Hogan gives its working range as EV −1 to EV 19 at ISO 100 with an f/1.4 lens, and notes it will focus with lenses down to f/8. Hogan also records what the body will not do: no mirror lock-up, no exposure bracketing without the optional data back, no VR lens support at all, and G-type lenses restricted to program and shutter-priority.
  7. No launch price appears in Nikon's own material. Mike Eckman puts the N90s above $1,000 for the body at launch, and Thom Hogan records spending about US$5,000 moving into the Nikon autofocus system in 1994. Second-hand, CamerAgX writes about $25 for a good body in 2018 and Casual Photophile paid $40 in 2017.
  8. Mike Eckman writes that "the N90s included a new auto focus engine known as CAM 246", which would make the module new in 1994. The contemporary account is against him. Photography in Malaysia describes the CAM 246 as "all new Nikon designed" for the F90 of 1992 and has both bodies using it; Thom Hogan names CAM246 in his N90s review but never says it was new to that body; and nothing published anywhere names a separate module for the F90X. The entry keeps CAM246 for both bodies from 1992. What did change at the F90X is described everywhere as speed and accuracy rather than a different module, and Eckman is best read as attaching the module's name to the improvement he could feel.
  9. Eckman gives the North American sales run of the N90s as 1994 to 1999, against the 2001 discontinuation Wikipedia records for the F90X. The two are not in conflict: Wikipedia's dates are for manufacture — the article says the camera was "manufactured in Japan between 1992 and 2001" — while Eckman's are the years a North American buyer could walk into a shop and order one, and he adds that bodies were still being sold new as recently as 2004. A manufacturing run, a market's catalogue life and the tail of dealer stock are three different spans, and nothing here requires either source to be wrong.
How to tell them apart (expand)
  • CAM246 autofocus module with a wide-area sensor — Nikon's own summary calls it Wide-Area AF
  • 3D matrix metering, which needs a D-type Nikkor to supply the distance
  • Ten-pin remote socket on the front, with untethered caps that are routinely missing
  • Rubberised back coating that peels or turns tacky — an identification marker as much as a fault

F90:

  • Shutter speeds set in whole stops
  • An audible focus-confirmation beep, which the F90X does not have
  • The MB-10 grip mounts but its vertical release does nothing: the contacts in the battery chamber are absent

F90X:

  • Shutter speeds in 1/3 stops instead of whole ones
  • No beeper
  • The MB-10's vertical release works

Specifications

Format
24×36mm on 35mm film
Finder
Fixed eye-level pentaprism with LCD readout · 0.78× magnification · 92% coverage · no rangefinder image
Shutter
electromagnetically controlled vertical-travel focal plane · 30s – 1/8000 and B; whole stops on the F90, 1/3 stops on the F90X · flash sync 1/250; 1/60–1/250 in program and aperture priority, 1/30–1/250 on slow sync · self-timer
Film advance
integral motor; single frame, a 2 frames a second setting, and a continuous high setting whose published rate varies by source
Back
hinged, and interchangeable for the MF-25 and MF-26
Meter
TTL 3D matrix, centre-weighted and spot; EV −1 to +21 at ISO 100 with an f/1.4 lens, EV 3–21 on spot
Motor drive
Not compatible — The motor is integral. The MB-10 pack adds a vertical release and a deeper grip but no speed: it runs on the same four AA cells the body uses, and Wikipedia records that frame rate, autofocus speed and battery life are identical with and without it.
Weight
755 g
Dimensions
154 × 106 × 69 mm
Country
Japan
Accessories
MB-10 battery grip, four AA cells, vertical release live only on the F90X · MF-25 Data Back · MF-26 Multi-Control Back — multiple exposure, interval and delay, exposures to 12 hours, world time, flash bracketing, imprinting · MC-30 corded release, MC-20, ML-3 wireless release · AC-2E Data Link, which connects the camera to a Sharp palm-sized electronic organizer

19mm eyepoint, high enough to use with spectacles. The magnification, eyepoint and coverage are given by CamerAgX and the coverage figure is confirmed by Thom Hogan; Hogan lists the absence of a 100% finder among the camera's limitations.

Where sources disagree

Speeds — the increment on the F90
  • Whole stops on the F90, thirds on the F90X — Wikipedia and camera-wiki, and the basis of the id_markers above
  • Half stops on the N90, thirds on the N90s — Thom Hogan, who names this as the difference between the two

Better supported: Unresolved

Everyone agrees the F90X moved to 1/3 stops. What the earlier body did is given two ways, and Nikon's five-line archive page for the F90 does not say. On numbers the whole stop reading has the majority — Mike Eckman gives the N90s change as "1/3 EV steps instead of full EV", which is a second voice for it against Hogan's "the N90 uses half-stop changes" — but Hogan is the only one of the three who used both bodies professionally for years and who frames the increment as the specific thing that separates them, and majority is not evidence when no source cites a factory specification. Left open. The id_marker above still reads whole stops; it should not be relied on to separate the bodies until a factory specification settles it.

Film advance
  • F90: up to 3.6 frames a second (camera-wiki)
  • 4.3 frames a second, given once for the F90 and F90X together (Wikipedia)
  • F90X: 4.1 frames a second with focus tracking (Nikon's own product archive)
  • F90X: 4.1 fps with continuous autofocus, 4.3 fps with standard autofocus (camera-wiki)

Better supported: Nikon's 4.1 figure, which is the only one from the maker — but it is stated for the F90X, not for the F90

Wikipedia's infobox covers both bodies under one figure, and the upgrade from F90 to F90X is described everywhere as including a raised frame rate, so a single number cannot be right for both. No published figure for the F90 alone comes from Nikon.

What reviewers say

History

The F90 of 1992 was built to fix a competitive problem rather than to advance a design. Canon’s EOS bodies focused faster than Nikon’s, the F4 at the top of Nikon’s range was slow at it, and photographers were changing systems over the difference. Wikipedia describes the F90 as a stop-gap held out until the F5 could arrive, which it did not do until 1996. The stop-gap stayed in the catalogue until 2001.

The mechanism is the CAM246 module and a small motor in the body turning the lens through the same blade coupling the F-501 had introduced in 1986. Nikon’s own summary of the camera lists five things, and two of them matter: Wide-Area AF, and 3D matrix metering. The second is the one that outlived the camera. A D-type Nikkor reports how far away it is focused; the meter folds that distance into a matrix calculation that until then had worked from brightness and pattern alone, and the same figure drives the flash. Every Nikon exposure system since works this way.

The F90 was also the first Nikon body that could tell a lens to focus itself. The AF-I and AF-S Nikkors carry their own motors and the F-801 cannot command them; the F90 can. That is a quiet reversal of the decision the F-501 made in 1986, and the F90 is where both arrangements — screwdriver in the throat, motor in the lens — worked on one body for the first time.

Two years in, the F90X replaced it. The published changes are shutter speeds in thirds of a stop rather than whole ones, faster and more accurate focus, better weather sealing, a raised frame rate, a working vertical release on the MB-10 grip, and — recorded by Wikipedia as an improvement — the removal of the beeper. Photography in Malaysia reports Nikon claiming 25% more autofocus speed. Nikon’s own archive documents the F90X to the millimetre, 154 × 106 × 69 and 755g without batteries, and gives the F90 a bullet list.

That asymmetry produces the one figure this entry cannot settle. The continuous frame rate is published as 3.6 for the F90, as 4.3 for the two bodies jointly, as 4.1 for the F90X with focus tracking and 4.3 with standard autofocus. Since every account of the F90X says the rate went up, a single number for both cannot be correct, and no figure for the F90 alone comes from the maker.

There is a physical marker worth recording: the rubberised coating on the back of a great many F90 and F90X bodies peels or turns tacky with age. It does not affect the camera, the rubber elsewhere on the body is unaffected, and isopropyl alcohol takes the coating off cleanly to leave the hard finish underneath. It is now one of the reliable ways to identify a body that has not been refinished.

Kodak took the rest of the story. The DCS 400 series of digital SLRs were N90 and N90s bodies with a Kodak back on them, and a DCS 460C on an N90s went to NASA for the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. What remains unpublished is anything numeric: no production total, no serial blocks, no split between the two versions, and no indication of how many of the bodies that carried the first 3D matrix meter into the field are still working.

Expand Collapse

This history is AI-written, from the sources listed at the foot of the page. Where the record is silent it says so rather than filling the gap — but no human wrote these sentences.

Photographs

Nikon F90
Nikon F90x with the AF Nikkor 50mm — Alexdet at English Wikipedia, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)
Nikon F90
Nikon N90s with the AF 35–70mm — Martintoy, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Live listings

Asking price, USD: a median of $140 across 36 fixed-price listings on 2026-09-11 (middle half $89–$180). Tracked since 2026-09-06, 2 days: unchanged from $140.

By day
DateMedianMiddle halfListings
2026-09-11$140$89–$18036
2026-09-06$140$89–$18036

Asking prices from the listings scanned, not sales; junk-flagged rows and auction lots excluded; other currencies are not converted.

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Listings updated 2026-09-11. Links go to the shop or marketplace that carries the item.

Related: Nikon F-801 · Nikon F100 · Nikon F4

Lenses for this body: Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8 · Micro-Nikkor 200mm f/4 · Ai AF Nikkor 28mm f/1.4D

Sources (11)

Every page here is assembled from public sources, and the gaps are real ones. If you own this camera, know a serial number I'm missing, or can see where I have it wrong, tell me — corrections, serials and sample photos are all worth having.