d90_jelly

An example of the Nikon D90's "jelly" effect, caused by the CMOS sensor's rolling shutter.

Note that Flickr has degraded the image quality, so this isn't an accurate depiction of how well the D90 captures images in its 720p HD mode.

(This is for an article I wrote for the Seattle Times, which appeared on November 15, 2008.)

Comments and faves

  1. espressoDOM (43 months ago | reply)

    D90 video is pretty darn cool

    --
    Seen on your photo stream. (?)

  2. smenzel (43 months ago | reply)

    Interesting effect. Congrats on the D90.

  3. Liembo (43 months ago | reply)

    The jelly effect is annoying, but man, dig that DOF that you could never achieve with a regular old handicam type video camera.

  4. Jeff Carlson (43 months ago | reply)

    @Liembo: Yes, having whatever lens you want is great. If you're shooting on a tripod with locked settings, I can see how you can do very interesting things with the D90's video. Would be nice to think that a firmware update could fix some of its ills, but I don't know the innards deep enough to know if that's realistic.

  5. supersat (43 months ago | reply)

    From what I understand, the rolling shutter is baked into the CMOS sensor -- firmware can't change it. A uniform shutter is possible, but reduces the number of pixels you can pack on the sensor (and in still imaging applications, the physical shutter takes care of this, so you'll gladly take the extra pixels).

    Reducing the video resolution should let the image sensor read out the data faster (since there's less of it), which in turn, should reduce the jelly effect.

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