Review: Nikon D200

Ben Long

The Nikon/Canon rivalry is to photographers as the Apple/Microsoft rivalry is to computer nerds, or the BMW/Mercedes rivalry is to car aficionados. No matter which side you choose, if either, you can’t help but appreciate the other side for fostering a competition that yields better products for everyone.
Years ago, Canon took Nikon by surprise with the release of the EOS D30. Since then the companies have battled it out for the hearts and camera bags of the mid-range digital SLR market, a market segment that includes hobbyist and professional photographers.
With the release of the D200 (Figure 1), Nikon has for the first time unveiled a camera with a higher pixel count than Canon’s competitive offering (the EOS 30D). At 10 megapixels, the D200 offers an extra two million pixels more than 8 megapixel 30D. Nikon also throws in some nice extra features, and wraps it all up with a price tag that’s around $1,700, typically $300 more than the Canon offering.

Figure 1. Front, side, and back views of the Nikon D200.

 
Long-time Nikon users will be thrilled with the D200, thanks to its full feature set and excellent image quality.
Sturdy, with Lots of Buttons
The D200 is a fairly large camera with a surprisingly lightweight. Weighing in at 1.8 pounds, the D200 doesn’t bog down your camera bag. The body is constructed from a magnesium alloy and feels very sturdy, with sealed seams and excellent build quality. With this type of sealing, Nikon is raising the bar for mid-range SLRs.
Full disclosure: I am a confessed Canon shooter. As such, I find the Nikon interface annoying. That said, I really appreciate that Nikon has placed all of the essential controls on external buttons. You won’t have to dig into a menu to adjust quality, white balance, ISO, drive mode, focus mode, metering mode, exposure compensation, or bracketing. You can even reformat your media card using external buttons.
What I don’t like is that the D200’s interface uses a separate button or switch for everything, rather than doubling up controls. This means there are many buttons and switches on the camera, and they’re spread all over. Most controls are interlocked, so you have to push and hold one control while turning or pushing another. That makes it impossible to change a setting with one hand.
Current Nikon users accustomed to this configuration can take this complaint with a grain of salt. But if you’re a prospective buyer with little or no prior Nikon D-SLR experience, get your hands on as many cameras — from as many vendors — as you can. It’s the only way to know which body design and interface make the most sense to you.
Features
The D200 has an impressive feature list — impressive both because of its breadth and because the features are actually tools that working photographers will use. Many of these have filtered down from the much more expensive Nikon D2x. So, while the D200 is priced at the high end of the mid-range market, you get much more than a higher pixel-count sensor: You get high-end features, as well.
Some of the D200’s stand-out amenities:

• A bright, beautiful 2.5-inch LCD screen.
• A depth of field preview button that’s easily reachable with your shutter finger.
• A viewfinder that’s surprisingly bright and clear.

The D200 is a fun camera to shoot with. Though the shutter is not as quiet and silky as the D70s, the camera still has a very nice shutter feel.
Of course, all of the standard shooting features you’d expect are here: full Program mode along with priority modes, and full manual. Nikon doesn’t bother with pre-programmed scene modes, an intelligent step for this market.
The D200 provides shutter speeds of 30 seconds to 1/8000th of a second, an improvement over the 1/4000th of its predecessor, the D100, and right in line with the EOS 30D’s equivalent shutter speed.
Metering is provided by Nikon’s excellent 3D Color Matrix Metering system. The D200 also provides a center weight meter and a spot meter. The Auto Focus system is similarly well-appointed, offering four different autofocus modes. However, I found it fairly easy to stump the autofocus system in low light. Low-light focusing was often slow, and occasionally failed completely.
While the D100 had an ISO range of 200 to 1600, Nikon has finally realized that the slow end is as important as the fast end and extended the range to 100 to 1600. The extra stop is a welcome improvement for daylight shooting. ISO is adjustable in third-stop increments and the camera provides an in-viewfinder ISO readout, making it possible to change ISO without taking your eye from the viewfinder.
One of the D200’s most impressive features is its auto-bracketing capability. While the EOS 30D provides a basic three-step auto-bracket, the D200 lets you bracket up to 9 shots. What’s more, you can define a bracket of only 2 shots. I usually like to shoot a metered shot and an overexposed shot, so the 3-stop auto-bracket on my Canon camera always gives me an extra image. Ideally, I’d like to be able to define a custom spacing between each stop.
JPEG shooters will appreciate the camera’s white balance tweaking and bracketing features (the D200 can also bracket the flash, or both flash and exposure), as well as the ability to saved named white balance presets. All of the standard image parameters are available and adjustable, and the camera lets you save up to 45 custom settings.
The D200 provides two kinds of noise reduction: Long Exposure Noise Reduction, which aims to reduce the stuck pixel artifacts that can occur when shooting long exposures, and High ISO Noise Reduction, which reduces the luminance and chrominance noise that higher ISOs produce.
Some other high-end features are buried in the menu. An intervalometer lets you perform automated time-lapse shooting, with full control over number of images taken at each interval, duration of the interval, and number of intervals to shoot. It’s is an excellent ability that more cameras should have.
Loosely related to the intervalometer is the repeating flash mode, which lets you program the flash to fire at regular intervals for a given amount of time. It’s great for creative long-exposure photography.
The D200 can even shoot multiple exposures. Program in the number of shots you want to include, and the D200 automatically composites those shots into a single multiple-exposure image. The Image Overlay feature lets you control the opacity of each composited image. Performing composites in-camera seems like kind of a waste of time, but the feature works and is well-implemented.
The D200’s menu is reasonably well-organized, but navigating with the four-way rear-mounted control is frustrating because you have to push repeatedly to scroll up and down the menu. Nikon should make one of the camera’s two control wheels function as a menu navigator.
However, the menu system includes a Recent Settings page which lists the 14 most recently accessed items. This greatly speeds navigation.
Image Quality
There’s very little to complain about with the D200’s image quality. Color accuracy, saturation, contrast, and tone are all excellent. Sharpness and detail vary with lens quality, of course, but you’ll be hard-pressed to get a bad image (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Like its predecessors, the D200 yields excellent image quality whether you shoot in JPEG or raw. Click on the image for a larger view.

 
However, I found that the D200 didn’t do as well as other cameras in low-light shooting conditions. Starting from ISO 800 and up, the camera produces noticeably more noise than Canon’s EOS 30D (Figure 3). If you make your living shooting in darker conditions, this might be a deal-breaker.

Figure 3. In these 100% crops, the Canon 30D image is on the left, and the Nikon D200 shot is on the right. As you can see, at ISO 1600 the D200 produces substantially more noise than the 30D.

 
For JPEG shooters, the camera provides plenty of in-camera customization. If you’re a raw shooter, you’ll have lots of latitude during your conversion. The D200 raw format is now supported by all major raw converters, including Photoshop Camera Raw and Apple’s Aperture.
Add-Ons
Nikon offers a tremendous selection of lenses, including a dedicated DX series of lenses designed specifically for the smaller crop created by the camera’s APS-sized sensor.
The D200 supports a couple of other cool accessories. A WiFi transmitter can automatically transmit images to your computer, making for tethered shooting functionality without the tether. A GPS receiver is also available, letting you tag your images with position information at shoot-time.
Should You Buy It?
For people who own Nikons and want to stay with what they know, the D200 is an exciting release. Great image quality and better overall specs make it a valuable addition to the Nikon product line. If you’re not already a Nikon shooter, then the D200 is a great offering — as long as you’re comfortable with the camera’s controls. Interface affinity is a very subjective thing, and you really must make that call yourself.
While you’re testing, ask yourself if you can easily get to the essential, everyday shooting functions: exposure compensation, ISO speed, bracketing, drive mode, and if you’re a JPEG shooter, white balance. Then consider secondary operations: changing to priority or manual mode, metering, and focus modes.
No matter where your camera loyalties may lie, the D200 will probably affect you thanks to Nikon’s merging of high-end features in a mid-range price. Hopefully, this means that such features as expanded auto-bracketing and intervalometers will become expected features in more cameras in this market.