Sylvain’s Panama Adventure

Part 1 - First impressions

I was able to spend a couple of hours playing with my new D200 yesterday but because of work and the bad weather I wasn’t able to go out and actually take some pictures! So I decided to give you some first impressions, to be followed by a more detailed assessment of the performance later on.

First of all, this is a very substantial camera. From the moment you take it out of the box, you realize this no plastic toy; this is indeed a very serious and professional looking camera. The magnesium alloy body and tough finish feel very solid and sturdy. This camera feels like it will take a lot of abuse and last a long time. The top of the camera is probably the only vulnerable area, with the plastic pop-up flash and the very large piece of glass covering the top LCD screen. To me this tough construction and the extensive weather seals alone were worth the price of upgrading. I spend a lot of time walking outside in the rain and snow and not having to worry too much about moisture getting into the camera is going to be a big relief. This professional grade construction is probably my favourite “feature” of this new camera.

The second thing that struck me is the extremely good ergonomics of this camera. It feels wonderful in the hands and all the controls are placed just about perfectly. The grip is nicely shaped and fits very nicely in my hand. The rubber-like finish feels good and is very “grabby”, so you do not feel like it will easily slip out of your hands. There are many more switches on the D200 then there are on the D70. This may be a bit overwhelming for the beginning photographer but I am very happy to be able to control most of the important settings without having to dive into the extensive menus. This includes things like switching between the AF-S and AF-C auto focus mode, switching between the various auto-focus sensor configurations, switching between spot, center-weighted, and matrix metering, and switching between the single, continuous-low-speed, and continuous-high-speed shooting modes. The programmable function button is also a nice addition and I have decided to assign the “spot-metering” function to it for now. We’ll see how that works out in the field. The only negative point on the ergonomics front is the 5-way multi-controller wheel. The center “button” is no button at all and I find it very difficult to hit it reliably without hitting one of the other 4 positions first. This should have been designed with a separate and protruding button in the middle. Thankfully you do not need to use it a lot as most functions can be confirmed by hitting the right button or the enter button. Those who use L-brackets to mount their camera on a tripod have complained about the location of the data and power ports on the left side. However, there is only a limited amount of real-estate on these cameras and frankly, I do not see where else they could have put those ports without seriously compromising something else. Otherwise, this constitutes a very fine effort and a beautiful design that reminds me why I favour Nikon over the competition.

The top status LCD screen is much larger and easier to read then the one on the D70 and it also provides quite a bit more information. The real star though is the big colour LCD screen on the back; it is quite simply in a class of its own. It is big, sharp, and bright and it has a huge usable angle of view (170 degrees). This screen, combined with the extensive zooming and panning capability, allows you to do a detailed inspection of your shots to ensure proper focus, depth-of-field, and sharpness. That was something you simply couldn’t do on the D70; shots that appeared sharp on the LCD, would turn out to be out-of-focus once viewed on a computer. One minor drawback is that although the zooming and panning capability is very flexible, the way it has been implemented takes some getting used to. Another nice feature of this LCD screen is the possibility to view an RGB histogram of your picture for a more detailed determination of proper exposure. The D70 only had the more limited single-channel histogram.

The next major surprise is the viewfinder. On most small-sensor DSLRs, the viewfinder is small and dim. On the D70 for example, it was nearly impossible to visually set or confirm proper focus through the viewfinder. I’m happy to report that the D200’s viewfinder is much bigger and brighter and it is quite easy to focus manually with this camera. It also helps with composition and framing especially when using small aperture lenses like my big Sigma 50-500mm zoom. I think that once again, this improvement alone might have been worth the price of upgrading. Also, the D200 viewfinder carries forward the D70’s optional gridlines to help you with levelling and composition. I always leave that grid turned on as I find it tremendously helpful. Another nice surprise is the display of the current ISO setting in the viewfinder, which should help me avoid a mistake I made quite often with my D70: forgetting to reset the ISO after turning it up for one or two shots. When I was in Costa Rica last fall, I mistakenly ended up spending my most productive picture-taking day shooting at 1600 ISO, with unpleasant consequences. Apparently the eye-relief point on this viewfinder is a bit short for eyeglass wearers, but I have no way to verify that. Another small negative is that the viewfinder only covers 95% of the actual frame, but I find that I can compensate for that quite easily, so it doesn’t really bother me.

I spent quite a bit of time playing with the menu system and the seemingly endless custom settings. This camera offers an amazing amount of flexibility and will surely feel a bit overwhelming to the less experienced users. However, the menus are large and bright so they are easy to navigate, and they are laid-out quite nicely. Another very nice feature is the presence of 4 memory banks for custom settings. So for example, you can select bank A (the default), and adjust all the custom settings the way you want them for landscape shooting. You can then switch to bank B and adjust everything for portraits, do the same thing in C for sports, etc. You can then completely re-configure your camera simply by switching to a different bank. This is very handy, but it is unfortunate that you have to dive into the menus to change from one bank to the other. It would have been much more useful if you could quickly flip through the various setting banks, perhaps through the function button for example.

I was only able to spend a couple of hours shooting inside my small apartment, but that was enough to get a good feel for how the camera operates. In one word: FAST! This camera is very fast in everything it does. Start-up is virtually instantaneous, focussing is fast and precise, there is no perceptible shutter release delay, and the 5FPS continuous shooting mode just hums along nicely. One thing that really struck me is how smooth the shutter and mirror action is. With the D70 I could feel a definite “thunk” through the camera when the mirror slapped up and down; with the D200 it feels a lot smoother with very little vibration being felt at all. This is probably due in part to the shear heft of this camera, but I think Nikon has done a lot of work on the dynamics of this mirror system. This should help provide sharper images when using slower shutter speeds. Of course there is now a mirror lock-up shooting mode for those most critical macro shots. The auto-focus seemed to be very precise and snappy, even in the dim lights of my apartment, a welcome improvement over the D70 which tended to hunt in low light. This camera’s overall operation feels very smooth, fast, refined, and for lack of a better word professional!

So far I am quite impressed with the D200 and happy with my purchase. As others have already said on Nikonians.org, I think this camera will be the next Nikon classic. It is already proving to be the camera that convinces a whole lot of dedicated film shooters to convert over to digital, and seems to please the pros as much as it does the advanced amateurs. Many pros are saying that this camera provides 90 to 95% of what the flagship D2X offers, but at about 40% of the price! Canon’s 5D has a more advanced sensor but falls behind the D200 in terms of auto-focus and metering accuracy, speed, and build, yet it costs twice as much.

As soon as I’ve had some opportunities to go out and take some real pictures I will complete Part 2 of this review and add some sample shots.

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