Recommend me an upgrade!

[amolitor]

If you shoot raw, you might find you can stretch your usable range by shooting raw+jpeg. The jpeg uses in-camera noise reduction, which might surprise you with its excellence. By blending the camera jpeg with whatever you choose to do with the raw, you may be able to get better noise reduction than you have been.

 

[TheFantasticG]

If you ever pull the blacks up even just a little bit on a D90 raw then do it on a D7000 you will see the difference immediately. I know this from experience enough I can tell a D90 image if the shadows were pulled. It gets ugly in the dark areas in a hurry. That's why I upgraded.

 

[amolitor]

It had not occurred to me until now, but in real terms these small upgrades are generally going to give you either no low light improvement or one stop, depending on your standards!

If the ISO1600 performance on your camera is aaaalmost good enough, then a small upgrade in sensors might well push you over the edge to "ok, that's good enough", which essentially moves you one stop, from 800 to 1600.
If the ISO1600 performance is good enough, but the ISO3200 is a horrible mess, then a small upgrade might well clean up the ISO3200 performance -- but not enough for your tastes. The result is no change, you still use 1600.

Of course the ISOs you are willing to use will look marginally better with an upgrade, so there's that. But you may or may not actually get an extra stop of usable performance, depending.

 

[LakeFX]

If you ever pull the blacks up even just a little bit on a D90 raw then do it on a D7000 you will see the difference immediately. I know this from experience enough I can tell a D90 image if the shadows were pulled. It gets ugly in the dark areas in a hurry. That's why I upgraded.

If the ISO1600 performance on your camera is aaaalmost good enough, then a small upgrade in sensors might well push you over the edge to "ok, that's good enough", which essentially moves you one stop, from 800 to 1600.
If the ISO1600 performance is good enough, but the ISO3200 is a horrible mess, then a small upgrade might well clean up the ISO3200 performance -- but not enough for your tastes. The result is no change, you still use 1600.

It's the combination of these two that have me thinking the D7000 would be worthwhile. I'm not sure if the ISO3200 performance would be good enough or not, but the improvement in ISO1600 would be really nice. Combine that with the better dynamic range and I could shoot things a little under exposed when necessary to keep shutter speeds where I need them and still have usable data in the RAW file.

Thanks for the real world advice!