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I’ve had several (well, okay, like two) people ask me about how I like the Nikon D200 relative to the D70. In a nutshell, I’d say that I think it’s a great upgrade for tinkerers, button-fetishists, and serious amateurs with thoughts of someday doing photography for money, albeit not an all-around slam-dunk improvement.

The good

Right off the bat, I should say that I think the physical build quality and handling of the D200 are top-notch. It feels (to me, anyway) better in the hand than any DSLR I’ve had the chance to try out, including the Canon 5D, Pentax K10D, and a bunch of other Nikons. I do have relatively large hands, and tend to shoot with medium-weight glass (85mm f/1.8D, 20-35mm f/2.8D) hanging off the front, though, so if you’re used to a D50 or D70 + 50mm prime or 18-55mm kit zoom, a D200 may seem like a lot of weight to haul around.

In terms of control and ergonomics, I’d also call it best-in-class. Aside from the lack of an integrated vertical grip, (which I’m honestly happy about a lot of the time when space is at a premium) the overall haptics and control placement are awesome. I’m about 95% of the way to being able to tweak every key setting (ISO, WB, quality, AF mode, shutter mode, auto-bracketing, exp. compensation, and flash control) completely blind, w/o taking my eye away from the viewfinder, and I’ve only put a couple of thousand activations on my D200.

(Speaking of viewfinder, I should mention that while the D200 trounces the D70, the D40 and D80 aren’t far off. If you do any amount of manual-focus shooting, it is well worth moving to a newer body, since they all have bigger, brighter viewfinder images.)

The other strong points relative to its competition in the sub-$1500 realm are metering, continuous shooting speed, and JPEG quality out-of-camera. The latter is pretty critical for me, since I take pictures almost entirely as a hobby, and don’t really want to spend hours doing RAW->JPEG conversion after I get home from a day of shooting. With rare exception, I find that the JPEG images produced from the D200 have good color and contrast, though I do tend to shoot with the ‘Tone compensation’ (a.k.a. tone curve) set to +1, for a little extra “punch”.

The last major win is the d-TTL metering with my SB-600 flash. I am constantly amazed at the images I pull off with the unit, no matter what direction and style (direct, bounce, diffused) of light it’s putting out. Off-camera, with a decent bounce card, it produces images that could easily be studio-lit, and does so with very little fuss.

The bad

There are a few downsides, however. Compared to the D70, (and to an even greater degree, the D40 I shot for a while as a stopgap while saving for the D200) high-ISO noise is a bit of a bear. That’s not to say that you can’t get good, well-exposed, clean-looking night images, but you really can’t just leave the thing dialed up to 1600 and shoot with abandon like I did with the D70 and D40. The best thing the D200 has going for it in this department is the extra resolution, which means that I can run some pretty aggressive NR on images, then scale ‘em down and sharpen to get equivalent quality and resolution to the 6MP bodies.

Also, the battery life is realistically only 1/2 to 2/3 as good as the D70. I tended to go a week or more between charges on that camera, and while I owned three batteries, I really only ever needed to carry one. I’ve heard rumors that the batter life actually gets *better* as you own the camera longer, but that seems so counter-intuitive that I’ll only believe it when I see it.

Is is worth it?

So, is it a worthwhile upgrade? That depends, really. For me, I think the extra durability and weather/dust seals will make this body last a lot longer than my D70, which I basically wore out after about 40K shutter activations. (Nikon has since been able to repair it, and a friend is happily shooting with the refurbished body.) I also still hold out hope that I’ll start doing a bit more “staged” shooting for bands, weddings, and the like, at which point the extra manual control, resolution, and continuous shooting speed of the D200 will definitely pay off.

For my current style of photography, though, and for most of the casual shooters I know, though, the D200 is almost certainly overkill. It’s a professional’s tool, and at times makes compromises in terms of producing the cleanest images out of the camera in favor of being true to the original exposure. Be prepared to a lot more time in Photoshop (or Aperture, or Lightroom, or whatever your preferred digital photography workflow app may be) that you would with a more “consumer-oriented” body like the D40 or D80.

Overall, because I’ve already invested in a fair bit of Nikon gear, and because I got such a good deal on my D200, I’d say that I’m personally very happy with my purchase.