D200

The king is Dead. Long live the King!

The old (lower-case 'k') king in this case was my wife's Nikon CoolPix 950. The new (capital 'K') King is her Nikon D200 digital SLR. The Coolpix was actually a decent digital camera -- for shooting anything that was well-lit, didn't move, and if the camera was mounted on a tripod. It's startup time was slow. The shutter release delay was slow. The only thing fast about it was the rate at which it chewed through batteries. It was even too big to really be useful as a convenience camera, you could stuff it in a back pocket, but, well, your ass would be huge as a result. And likely the batteries would be dead when you went to use it.

A crappy picture of a great camera. Taken with the now deposed Coolpix 950.

The Coolpix's reign has always been in jeopardy, but it's demise became certain two weeks ago when Scorpion1 stormed up from the studio after trying to shoot some shots of her recent paintings and declared, "That's it, I want a good digital camera! I DON'T CARE WHAT IT COSTS!!! And I want a new tripod too!"

Good Lord woman, don't ever tell a technology loving nerd that new hardware is needed and price isn't a consideration. It's a recipe for Pentagon levels of spending.

A decent picture of a great cat (Moby) taken with the D200. If you ask me he's named after Melville's whale, but my wife insists his namesake is Mr. Hall. Given the Hall-Melville connection I think we're both right :-)

In the end I exhibited some restraint, I resisted the siren call of Nikon's D2Xs, but finding a good deal on a D200 kit with a Nikkor 18-70mm 3.5-4.5 lens we did max out the prosumer level.

Nikon Coolpix 950

While comparing the D200 to the 950 is unfair and makes about as much sense as contrasting an Aprilia Tuono 1000 R Factory with a Honda Metropolitan, they are both digital cameras, just like the Aprilia and the Honda are two-wheeled conveyances...

Nikon D200

...I won't pretend to give a in-depth review of the D200's technical merits, I'll leave that to the far more qualified, or wait until I at least have some more time with it. But I can say simply that it makes taking pictures easy and the D200 is everything the 950 wasn't. If you can't take a good picture with it it's you, not the camera. In fact that's the only real drawback (other than price): I can't blame the gear anymore :-P

ptb