11. In Practice

With its perfect handling, reassuring heft and responsiveness, the D200 undeniably makes a good first impression, but be careful not to let that create euphoria. Taming a model like this, once you get beyond the simplest shooting conditions, will require attention and some technical know-how. The multitude of options and adjustments that influence the results you get mean you'll have to read the user's manual carefully and explore the menus in depth to get the most out of the unit.

The Custom Image Optimization menu provides a host of choices.

Simple optimization offers fairly standard options, but has a "Portrait" position.

The Shooting menu has standard adjustments like JPEG compression, but also noise reduction for high ISO sensitivities.

Autofocus has its own menu, with a plethora of choices!

The built-in flash settings allow both subtle and versatile use of the flash.

You can change the effect of the camera's physical controls to suit your tastes and habits.

To help you avoid getting lost in the labyrinth of menus, a "Recent Settings" display lets you access the adjustments you use most often.

The Playback menu is fairly simple, but still offers a good number of possibilities.

In discussing the quality of the images produced by a camera, you have to be aware that it's greatly influenced by the lenses you use and the way that you use them. We have yet to find a wide-aperture lens that can produce first-class results at full aperture. In the wide-angle position, even the very expensive Nikon 2.8/17-55 showed weaknesses at f/2.8. It's undeniably much better than the Sigma 2.8/18-50 at that aperture, though the difference lessens when you close down one stop, and at f/5.6 the two lenses can be considered equivalent in quality. Each one shows slight weaknesses - a slight blur on the right with the Nikon and on the left with the Sigma, for example - but let's keep things in perspective; with ordinary-sized prints, the images will be superb! Remember that when you view a shot at the pixel level at 100% size on a computer screen, you're examining an image that corresponds to a print that would be over three feet wide. You probably don't make prints that big very often.