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Ongoing D200 probs and getting worse....

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Lechlade

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Having had the D200 for 3 weeks now and fully accepting the change of pace from the D70, the shock that I felt initially about the D200 isn't going away. I have a horrible suspicion, that I have one that was made late on a Friday afternoon.

Usual problems with sharpness, but as a RAW shooter, this didn't bother me much. I am having great difficulties in PP and not doing anything drastic either. Today, have taken 700 shots and not one of them has the quality to be a keeper. The D70 was wonderful in PP. You could psush and pull, mnipulate the hell out of it if you wished - and had the same friendly consistent 1 stop underexposure, but no blow outs, no artifacts rearing their heads and a stable NEF in either PS, Paintshop Pro or Capture. The D200 NEF feels like a bomb, in that you hardly dare touch it. On some shots today, (ISO 200, Bigma all running nicely at F8 or F9, 1000th/Sec average for aviation shooting) you simply cannot use unsharp mask as the artifacts are almost visible from the word go. The noise screams at you and some shots are just blown out. Shooting a friend from 25 feet has given a face as full of "grain" as it is devoid of detail. Something sounds dodgy to me. I get the same difficulty with the Nikon 18-70, though oddly, not anywhere near as much with the 18-125 Sigma that the dealer has kindly loaned me, whilst waiting for the 18-200VR (or was it a Pink Elelphant?)

My ratio of keepers with the D70 was consistently high at maybe one in six. So far, with the D200 I have less than two in 2500 shots.

If anybody can relate to these problems, or has any thoughts, I would be obliged if they would jot them down here. I really am beginning to despair and the final insult, is that the D70 has sold and goes to a new home on Thursday. Again, I wonder if this one is a Lemon.

Cheer me up folks - tell me it is all a bad dream.

John (Lechlade)
 
So why don't you post some, and give details? What you were shooting, what lens, EXIF info, ect. The level of detail and descriptions you use in this rather verbose post provides enought information to basically determine only that you shoot a lot, and are unhappy.
--
Ron
'You will never get out of this life alive!'
 
Had just unwrapped the D200 and posted second picture (100% crop) I find the D200 is, or better: Can be incredibly sharp ... the picture on the link below was taken hand held, NO tripod, manual, no fill flash ... very happy with the results!!!!!!!!!!!! Either your camera is faulty or you are trying to wind people up here?? Hope its your camera, it can be a bit tedious when people on camera forums are trying to sort out their personal problems here ... ya know what I mean??

Have a look and let me know whether the detail etc is acceptable to you?

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1021&message=18438454

Deed, Auckland, New Zealand
Lechlade said:
Having had the D200 for 3 weeks now and fully accepting the change
of pace from the D70, the shock that I felt initially about the
D200 isn't going away. I have a horrible suspicion, that I have one
that was made late on a Friday afternoon.

Usual problems with sharpness, but as a RAW shooter, this didn't
bother me much. I am having great difficulties in PP and not doing
anything drastic either. Today, have taken 700 shots and not one of
them has the quality to be a keeper. The D70 was wonderful in PP.
You could psush and pull, mnipulate the hell out of it if you
wished - and had the same friendly consistent 1 stop underexposure,
but no blow outs, no artifacts rearing their heads and a stable NEF
in either PS, Paintshop Pro or Capture. The D200 NEF feels like a
bomb, in that you hardly dare touch it. On some shots today, (ISO
200, Bigma all running nicely at F8 or F9, 1000th/Sec average for
aviation shooting) you simply cannot use unsharp mask as the
artifacts are almost visible from the word go. The noise screams at
you and some shots are just blown out. Shooting a friend from 25
feet has given a face as full of "grain" as it is devoid of detail.
Something sounds dodgy to me. I get the same difficulty with the
Nikon 18-70, though oddly, not anywhere near as much with the
18-125 Sigma that the dealer has kindly loaned me, whilst waiting
for the 18-200VR (or was it a Pink Elelphant?)

My ratio of keepers with the D70 was consistently high at maybe one
in six. So far, with the D200 I have less than two in 2500 shots.

If anybody can relate to these problems, or has any thoughts, I
would be obliged if they would jot them down here. I really am
beginning to despair and the final insult, is that the D70 has sold
and goes to a new home on Thursday. Again, I wonder if this one is
a Lemon.

Cheer me up folks - tell me it is all a bad dream.

John (Lechlade)
Click to expand...
 
How about showing us one of the bad pictures?
--
JC
 
I hope I don't get yelled at (I love my D200) but I have noticed that D70 images seem more "maluable" in PP. I could really do some wild curves on D70 images and they would hold up quite well.

Then again, the D200 seems to get it better straight from the camera. Part of the adjustment for me has been learning to get it right from the camera and doing as little PP as possible.

2 months of using the D200 and I'm still learning an awful lot - mostly about proper shooting technique in regards to holding the focus where I want it.

I personally feel that the D70 will give a novice like me a lot more "8" or "9" images than the D200 - but the D200 is capable of giving me a perfect "10" (something the D70 is not capable of). I just need to practice more.
 
Lechlade said:
Having had the D200 for 3 weeks now...
My ratio of keepers with the D70 was consistently high at maybe one
in six. So far, with the D200 I have less than two in 2500 shots.
...
Click to expand...
A D200 is surely not a D70, neighter is lens A equal to lens B and lens A and / or B might give other results on another body. Assuming you're not trolling and that you know what you're doing, I expect a faulty D200.

Your problems / ratio seems very unlikely with a good camera.

Like others asked, please post some samples.

****.

--



My photo's: http://arubaphoto.smugmug.com
My pets: http://www.bikebird.com
 
Hi, John. The d200 is very sensitive to camera shake, and likes to work with good glass. Try using some high end Nikon glass, and keep your shutter speeds shorter than the reciprocal of 2 times the focal length. You'll be amazed at the results.

--
Warm regards, Uncle Frank
FCAS Founder, Hummingbird Hunter, Egret Stalker
Dilettante Appassionato
Galleries at http://www.pbase.com/unclefrank
 
I agree with Uncle Frank; to fully appreciate the impact of camera shake you need to mount the D200 with a good lens on a tripod. If you use a good lens and take a photo in good light (or with an external flash) you might be amazed at the detail you can get. If you have Nikon Capture Editor use the feature that shows the exact focus location (to make sure you were focused on what you thought you shot). Also, once you do some tripod shooting, try various apertures. Lenses have sweet spots; too wide or to closed down and they probably aren't at their sharpest; too wide also can provide very little depth of field. All these things add up. If you haven't tried mounting a D200 on a tripod and remotely controlling the camera from your computer with Nikon Capture you are in for a treat - it will let you isolate all sorts of variables with very (sort of) quick visual feedback on your monitor (via the USB cable connection).

Yada
Uncle Frank said:
Hi, John. The d200 is very sensitive to camera shake, and likes to
work with good glass. Try using some high end Nikon glass, and
keep your shutter speeds shorter than the reciprocal of 2 times the
focal length. You'll be amazed at the results.

--
Warm regards, Uncle Frank
FCAS Founder, Hummingbird Hunter, Egret Stalker
Dilettante Appassionato
Galleries at http://www.pbase.com/unclefrank
Click to expand...
 
I have totally different experience. I have more keepers with the D200 than the D70. Especially with macro shots of flowers, I can get sharper pics with the D200. And, I don't use a tripod for most of my flower shots (I do use a tripod all the time, when I shoot landscapes, seriously.)

I took this yesterday, and I did sharpen it the same way I used to do for the D70 pics in Nikon Capture. It looks a litte too sharp to me, and I'll probably make it less sharp.



Masa
--
http://www.pbase.com/masa_k
 
I had a similar problem at first. Boy was I arrogant. I've had 40 or more cameras in my life, and I figured a few hours and I'd be a champ. The D70s was like that.

But this is an entirely different beast. Took me a few months to produce consistent, well-exposed sharp images, and I'm still not up to speed on things like tracking birds in flight. I must say it was worth the effort.

1) One thing to check: Make sure the focus mode lever on the front of the camera is fully engaged in an autofocus position (C/S). I find it slips to manual, or between settings too easily.

2) I do agree with you about the "finicky" post-procesing. There is not a lot of leeway (especially on exposure, fill light and sharpening) until you run into really nasty noise, even at ISO 320. With this camera, you've got to get really close to dead on exposure or lose the shot.

3) But I do disagree with several of the replies. If this camera requires tripod, remote and only the highest-end glass, than its fairly useless for most of us. What do I do for rock concerts, sporting events and wildlife shots where I can't use a tripod?

I shoot the Sigma 100-400 f/4 EX and I'm getting excellent sharp images without ridiculously high shutter speeds (and if others had read your post fully, they would have realized that you said that you'd done most of your shots at 1/1000th, which should be fast enough for most lenses, and certainly for the lenses you noted).

But there indeed could be something wrong. My camera is at Melville for repair right now, and one of the issues is an unpredictable AF. Sometimes the images are dead-on, sometimes -nothing- is in focus.

You need to run a test. You can download my test sheet here:

http://www.aakatz.com/dpreview/testfocus.doc

Print it out on glossy photo paper.

Lay the sheet on a table top.

Hold the camera at a 15-20 degree angle to the table top and focus on the line that says "focus here".

If that line is in focus, it's not your camera. If focus is several lines in front of or behind the focus line, you have front- or back-focus.

If nothing is in focus, yet the camera indicates that it has acquired focus, send it in to Nikon for repair.

Hope this helps...

--
=~ AAK - http://www.aakatz.com
=~ Author of the H-Series White Paper
=~ http://www.aakatz.com/h1whitepaper
 
Joe Ellis wrote:
[SNIP}
Joe Ellis said:
I personally feel that the D70 will give a novice like me a lot
more "8" or "9" images than the D200 - but the D200 is capable of
giving me a perfect "10" (something the D70 is not capable of). I
just need to practice more.
Click to expand...
Spot on! You have identified the right suspect and because you have realised what your problem is; you not the camera, your photogrpahy will improve. It is quite a brave thing to do, it being all too easy to blame the camera.

I think the initial poster is a troll and was quickly identified.

Mustrum
--
My God! It's full of elephants.
 
Well, what a revelation! a Good 40% of respondees accuse me of trolling. You sound like a bunch of circus seals that have climbed on top of their little stands and been thrown a kipper. Are you all so insecure that you feel having a camera you probably own yourselves questioned, comes over as a criticism levelled at yourselves? ? My suggestion to you is to grow up, or get out more often. You sound so insecure.Your narrow imagination has given me much amusement and right now, with this camera, I could certainly use some.

Last night, I was too tired to upload to the net and then include a few shots here, I am afraid. I certainly have a NEF or two that I can save as a JPEG and post here, (I will do so a little later) so that you can see them, but it is the delights of PP as much as anything, that concern me. It feels almost like doing PP on a jpg with so little latitude. On some shots it is impossible to add any saturation or USM. Just in case it is a software issue, I am checking across the computer to see if these problems are more prevalent in one program or another. Later I will try on another PC, with Capture. Interestingly, the last job last night was to email Corel and see what the state of play was with Paintshop Pro V9.0 as it doesn't read D200 NEFs. This morning, I got the email back, telling me that A it doesn't and B They have no plans for it to do so anytime soon.

A few other sundry points.

It is impossible to use a tripod for much of what I shoot. The target is doing anythng up to eleven miles a minute and crosses just a few hundred metres from you and sometimes a lot less, in a rapidly changing block ranging mainly, from 2,000m down to 25m. (Interestingly enough, on the way home yesterday and before seeing the results, I was quite hopeful. So much so that I popped into a camera shop and bought a Manfrotto 190 and the upgraded pan and tilt head, to replace my existing tripod)

I would love to get some top notch Nikon glass, but have made my lens purchases for the for at least the next few years. So far, I have spent well over £2,000 up-grading from the D70 and am ending up with far less quality than I had with the former camera.

My aim in posting, was to see if anybody else out there can identify with the overall feel, from taking shots through to post processing. I am confident that if I return the camera to Nikon, that I will simply lose it for three weeks. If that is what it takes, then so be it - but if one of you can give me the benwfits of your own experience, then I may well discover that my technique that worked so well with the D70 is just a complete no no with the D200.

Thanks to those of you that offered useful advice.
 
...........camera but I've found it to be an uphill battle to get easy with it. Someone on this forum recently suggested folks with focus problems read this site:

http://www.cleanimages.com/Article-UnderstandingNikonMultiCAM2000AF.asp

I did (about 7 times) and now I've got it. It's an extremely sophisticated focusing system and to get the most out of it you have to understand how it works. Like some of the others I'd suggest you have good glass and a tripod before making any evaluations.

BTW, thanks to whoever brought up the Digital Darrell site on focusing. It was a great help for me.

ray..

--

'When trying to make art, don't make the camera do all the work.' from CBS Videographer Darryl Barton at NPPA boot camp.
 
Firstly I must apologise about a typo on the earlier post. Should have put in that it was about 20% of you thinking I was a troll. Trying to upload some pictures now, to Photobucket.

Many thanks,

John (Lechlade)

PS I avoided many of the complexities of the D200 AF in going for mainly single centrepoint focus and I don't seem to have any real focus problems as such. With the magnificent viewfinder, it is easy to do.
 
I to have had very inconsistent results from my D200. I have already sent it back to Nikon once for a back focus problem but yet again last evening, 6:30-7:30, I was out taking some shots and had every other shot be off on the focus. I was using a monopod and flash with a 18-200 VR and a Pro 105 Micro VR. Both lenses gave very inconsistent results.

Some of the shots I see posted here on this site look so much better then any, and I do mean ANY, shot I have taken with the D200 since I got it, before and after sending it to and getting it back from Nikon service. It doesn't matter what program I use to PP the images they always come out soft and or out of focus. I'm just about ready to send the body and all my lenses to Nikon to have them look at it all.
 
Masa...I've taken a lot of flower photos this spring, and looked at quite a few on the Nikon forums here...yours is by far one of the best I've seen..what a beautiful shot.
--
BigAppa
 
Post some samples!
 
Alan,

Can you check the link to your test sheet please? I keep getting an error when I click on it. I also sent my camera to Melville and asked them to check the AF, I would like to be sure that it is set up ciorrectly.

Thank you,
Bruce
--
http://CusinBrucie.smugmug.com/gallery/1285864/1/60412211

To see great art/digital photography check out: http://lipping.myexpose.com/gallery/

To Save $5.00 on opening your new Smugmug account use this coupon code :qgM1scrSuloRU

Nikon D200, 18-200mm VR lens
 
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