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Nikon,D200,camera,digital camera,battery

The Nikon D200 was announced on 1st November 2005, some three and a half years since Nikon revealed their first prosumer digital SLR, the D100. It's fair to say however that the Nikon d200 battery is a completely different beast altogether, it shares far more with its 'bigger brother' the the D2X than its earlier namesake. The D200 has the robust build quality of the D2X, a 10.2 million pixel CCD sensor and a compact design more like the D100. Just as the D100 the D200 has a CCD sensor, unlike the D2X which utilized a CMOS sensor. It's clear that this camera is aimed at the same kind of market as the recently announced Canon EOS 5D. From a features, control and performance point of view the D200 is closer to the D2X than any other model.

The D200 is a completely new body design that seems almost a perfect hybrid of the D50/D70 and D2 series. It has the size, pop-up flash, and battery heritage from the D100/D70/D50 progression, but the feature set, button layout, and menus of the D2 series. The D200 body construction is more like that of a D2, including metal framing and gaskets for weather protection and Nikon d200 battery, but in your hands it feels much more like the lower-end cameras due to the smaller size and some external construction cues. The one new thing not shared with other current Nikon camera body is the autofocus system, which we'll get to in detail in a bit. Compared to the D100 it replaced, the D200 has gone way upscale. The D200 is better built, better specified, has many more features, and is much more "pro-like" than "consumer." We've got a lot to talk about, so let's get started.

Shocked? You should be. Yes, this means that the D200 has most of the high-end D2x features:

• GPS support (requires the optional US$95 MC-35 Connecting Cable).
• Wireless support (requires optional WT-3).
• AI and AI-S manual lens support (can be used with the matrix meter after a bit of data input, though only in Aperture-priority and Manual exposure modes).
• User assignable FUNC button.
• Multiple exposures, assembled exposures.
• Multiple shooting banks, multiple custom setting banks.
• 10-pin and PC Sync connections.
• Extensive bracketing options (up to 9 frames).
• Mirror-Up and Mirror prerelease.
• NEF and JPEG files can be written simultaneously for each image, and you can choose the size and quality of the JPEG file to be written.
• An interval timer.
• A CF door interlock (though not as sophisticated).
• Channel histograms.
• Recent Settings tab.
• Gaskets throughout for weather sealing.

Heck, the D200 even adds intelligent battery life tracking ala the D2x (but to a different base battery, the EN-EL3).

The sensor in the D200 is a CCD made by Sony that appears for the first time in the D200. 10.2 effective megapixels mean 3872 x 2592 pixel images, enough to produce straight-from-camera prints up to about 11x16" without resizing. The base ISO of the CCD is 100, with third-stop increments up through ISO 1600. You can also boost ISO one more stop, up to an effective ISO 3200.

One aspect of the new CCD that is now controversial (more on the controversy in a bit) is that it supports a four-channel analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to get data off the sensor faster, thus allowing the 5 fps frame rate of the Nikon d200 battery. By four-channel, I mean that each of the repeated green photosites as well as the red and blue photosites of the Bayer pattern get dedicated off ramps to a separate ADC. Previous Nikon CCDs used single row transfer mechanisms, meaning that a single ADC processed all information.

We tested this camera with the new 18mm-to-200mm, f/3.5-to-f/5.6, G ED-IF AF-S VR DX Zoom-Nikkor, as well as with a variety of other Nikkor lenses. The new VR lens worked well, providing good sharpness throughout its range, albeit with moderate chromatic aberration (chiefly some cyan fringing around the edges of backlit subjects) and a little barrel distortion at the edges at the wide-angle end of its range. The vibration-reduction system let us shoot at shutter speeds about two increments slower than would be required normally, although this lens's f/5.6 maximum aperture at 200mm would have severely limited its use at an indoor concert had the D200 not performed so well at high ISO settings. 

Image defects stemming from nonoptical causes weren't overpowering, except for the JPEG artifacts that cropped up even with minimal (Fine) compression and Nikon d200 battery. Our images had good exposure and dynamic range, although reducing exposure to limit blown highlights also tended to produce flatter, low-contrast images. Colors were accurate and neutral, but the warm tones produced under incandescent illumination helped us appreciate the D200's white-balance adjustment tools.