Brown Easter Bunny Arrived...

and brought me this...

http://www.letsgodigital.org/html/re...on_d200_1B.jpg

I'm so excited.

Very nice! I own a D70 now but my next body will be a D200. I'm totally green with envy but also wish you lots of fun with it. Enjoy!

Those UPS guys get lost all the time... Wasn't that supposed to go to my house? :D

You read my mind!!!
Oh well, I just purchased a new MacBook Pro with the new Intel Core Duo processor. My wife is saying "one toy at a time". Women, they treat us like kids. Well, I'm off to play with my new Mac.

I hope you'll give us some updates on the performance of the D200.

Robert

Initial impressions compared to my d70 (for d70 owners pondering the upgrade):

Body is very similair, LCD is much bigger but you still imprint your nose on it (I hate this aspect of all displays, but where else could they put them? The body is heavier but more solid feeling.

The buttons are a lot different and changing things like shooting mode, etc take relearning. However, the ergonomics of Nikons is wonderful.

Seems like everyfeature is customiziable. I had to sift through the manual to enable the histogram and highlight settings on review. This camera has an RGB histogram option.

When shooting, the mirror flip up is lightning fast and feels so great to shoot. I can't tell how well the autofocus works compared to my D70 so much yet, but I will be investigating that soon. The 11 point autofocus is great--I always felt limited with the D70s 7 points (believe it or not).

I haven't figured out all the features but the interval shooting is a goodie. And I really like the ability to take raw+fine or raw+ normal photos. The d70 was set to raw+basic which really only gave you a photo that was to look at in a basic sense and you had to pull in the raw if you wanted to work with it. Having a better qual jpg, along with the raw, gives more flexibility in post processing. In my experience, this is a great change.

There are two rapid shooting modes; 5 fps or a custom of 2-4 fps. So you can set how the interval when doing rapid shooting. This is great for different kinds of sports shooting. I do a lot of that work and happy to see this kind of feature.

The small thing I'm bummed about is the battery. The d200 has a sense contact for more accurate battery gauging. Thus, the several batteries for my d70 are not compatible even though they are the same size. I of course can buy more of the newer batteries and use them on my d70 (i think) but having a slew of different batteries is kinda a drag. I just wish I could use the old battery, even if the camera couldn't monitor it. But nikon put a tab in there so it won't insert.

Having 5 frames per second is really nice, especially when bracketing. Now you can bracket, blast through the pix and then use dynamic range expansion tools like in photoshop and photoimpact to combine the best of all of them.

So far it is an amazing camera and I look forward to exploring all it's features. I will make another comparison to the d70 when I play some more.

Thanks Rich. That was a nice write-up.
Tim