D200 - What size CF card can it hold?

I have a couple questions about the D200.

 

First, what is the biggest CF card it can hold. Currently, I am using 2G cards,

but I plan a trip for a few weeks and don't want to bring a pocketful of cards

with me.

 

Second, what is the current version of the Firmware? I updated the firmware

over a year ago and so far have not heard of another update.

 

Thanks.

The D200 can take 16G cards (and larger, when available) without any problems.

 

The current firmware versions are 2.0 for both A and B. Since the D200 has already been superseded by the D300 and is, for all practical purposes, discontinued, I don't expect that it'll ever receive any more firmware upgrade.

There isn't much need for a firmware upgrade for the D200 - at least I haven't had any crashes or detected bugs in two years of quite active use of the body. It's still listed in the product catalogs and also it's in stock all around. Nikon is pricing it lower than it used to be and I think it's still competitive at its current price. It should be especially attractive to those with manual focus lenses and it has excellent ergonomics and no major omissions. The D300 has better image quality, live view, and autofocus, but is also significantly more expensive. The D80 is not in the same class in terms of the body size. And the price gap between the D80 and the D300 is quite big.

Sandisk has an interesting rebate on its cards at this time assuming I read things correctly. Two 8G Extreme III cards come with a $100 rebate in the form of a VISA debit card. You have 120 days to use the card and you can't get cash from it.

the largest capacity card I've used in one is a 16GB Sandisk Extreme III. I 've also used Kingston 266x CF cards in a D200 as well. I've had no problems with either.

 

My recommendation is 4GB Sandisk, Kingston or Lexar CF cards for the simple reason that the contents of a 4Gb card fits on a single DVD-R which makes it more straight forward to make a back up with.

I have a Lexar 4G and an 8G card. The only problem with the 8G card is that the buffer writes to it more slowly than the 4G card, even though both are marked 133X. If you don't fill the buffer, you won't have any problem with either card. Haven't tried anything larger.

 

The cards are small and easy to carry, so it's not a problem having more than one. If you worry about card space, shoot compressed RAW without JPG. It doesn't take that much more space than quality-optimized JPG, and RAW is much safer for your one-of-a-kind vacation shots than straight JPG.

 

The CF cards are one of the cheapest components of the camera, so it makes sense to have a spare or two.

Keep your cards at max size 4 GB, to facilitate easier backup to a DVD recordable media.

 

Pretty soon we could step up to 8 GB and a double layer DVD, or DVD_RAM.

 

Keep dreaming about Blue Ray media as backup, soon.

I would just love to buy a 100 GB blue-ray disc for $100 and have the burn process fail. Delightful idea. :-)

I might just be me - but I rather carry a handful of 2GB or max 4GB cards with me than putting all my eggs in one basket. Of all the cards I own - eight now - the only one that ever failed was the largest - an 8GB one.

What's so hard about using 8GB cards and copying the files to two DVDs?

 

Josh, how many photos do you expect to take?

 

One advantage of shooting with jpeg is that while you are still on vacation you can get prints and perhaps even backup disks made if the necessary 1 hour processors are nearby.

 

There's also no law against changing back and forth between RAW and jpeg and even choosing higher jpeg compressions if you start to run out of card space.

"What's so hard about using 8GB cards and copying the files to two DVDs?" - not only hard but sometimes impossible.

 

E.g. some Sony "dvdirect" models of stand alone memory card readers and DVD recorders to internal hard disc or to DVD media, will just reject cards of higher capacity, higher than the max recordable media limit. Similar limit exists for Wolverine Mode; 6040 card readers/hard drives.