I got my Nikon D90 with the kit lense Nikkor AF-S DX VR 18-55 mm 1:3,5-5,6G, which is not as bad as I expected. I had a closer look at the images and I compared the test results on dpreview.com (by the way, the lense database review flash tool they made is great.)

Of course the kit lense suffers from chromatic abberation, like all lenses. And this one a bit more in the center areas of the photo than my more expensive one, the Nikkor 18-200mm VR. Interesting is the in-camera image correction, correcting lense distortion and chromatic abberation. Not sure if this only works with Nikkor lenses, I will check this some day. As far as I know those corrections are done by the Nikon Expeed technology (which is built into a lot of Nikon’s cameras such as D80, D90, D300, even one or two Coolpix models, etc).

Comparison of an image corrected by the in-camera software of the Nikon D90 and without any corrections (processed with UFRaw)

This is a 100% Crop of a photo I made with the D90. The left version is the in-camera JPG, the right version is the RAW processed with UFRaw (without any corrections). You can see clearly the red and magenta chromatic abberation fringes on the right photo. At the lower right corner you can see that the distortion was corrected by the camera, too, as this are the exactly same crop areas.

I think this is quite impressive. It will be a reason for me to shoot JPG instead of RAW if the dynamic range of the scene I want to capture is not too high. At least until I discover a RAW processing software which is able to do corrections with a similar result. (The Nikon ViewNX software seems to do the same corrections as the in-camera software leading to the same results.)