dwight200

"...will the images lose quality while saving from RAW to high quality jpg???..."

 

Yes.

 

Jpg files are 8 bit while the RAW files are 12 bit for the D200.

Generally, manufacturers sell their printers below cost. Once you have a printer, you have to buy their toner cartridges, which is where the real profit is.

The Maha charger certainly looks interesting. They have another model, the 800S which is $20 cheaper for people who can stand a 2-hour charge instead of a 1-hour charge. http://www.mahaenergy.com/store/8compare.asp

It could be because since the flash has to overcome daylight, it's using the full charge for each flash. Indoors, there is less ambient light to overcome, so the flash can use less of the charge and therefore there is not as much recharging to be done.

I've had the Nikon 105 f/2.8 for about 6 months now and have had no focus problems. It does a real nice job on macro shots, which is my primary reason for having it. You can see some of my shots on http://flickr.com/photos/photofarmer/tags/105mmf28/.

There's a learning curve with all new things, particularly DSLR's coming from P&S cameras. For the D40 etc the learning time is fairly short. With the D200 it's moderately long. With something like the D3, it's probably quite long. There are so many options you will have to understand most of them to get consistently good pictures.

 

The D200 and higher level cameras can give you great pictures, but you're spending a lot of money on the body. You might be better off getting a lower level body and spending serious money on the lenses. Once you have a good set of lenses you can use them on your next body. Make no mistake about it -- once you invest in a DSLR you will be infected with NAS and there WILL be another body in your future. This is true even if you spring for a D200 now.

The lens ID is in the EXIF data. I'm not sure just what programs will read it. EXIFTOOL is one of them. Freeware.

On the D200, the custom setting banks do not take care of this. If you change a setting for a particular shot, it stays changed until you change it back. If you change from bank A to bank B and then back to bank A, the setting is still changed. There are more permutations in the settings than there are banks, and even if there were enough banks I'd never be able to keep track of them all.

 

The user default would be very helpful. More than once I've changed a setting for a shot and found out two days and 17 shots later that I forgot to change it back. The best way to reset to the user default would be on power up. A separate button would be OK, but you'd have to get into the habit of using it all the time. Resetting on power up would be fool resistant.

I would suggest you use the 18-70 for a couple thousand pictures in your normal pattern. When you have a large enough sample, analyze the EXIF files to see what the distribution of focal lengths you use looks like. If it's weighted toward one end or the other, look that way for your next lens.

 

There are programs out there to analyze the EXIF files in a group of photos in a batch, so you don't have to look at each one individually.

 

http://www.cpr.demon.nl/prog_plotf.html

You can test the quality of the polarizer (distinct from the quality of the glass) by holding a pair of polarizing sunglasses in front of the polarizer and rotating one of them. You should be able to find an orientation where you get very little light through. Note that if you turn the circular polarizer around so you're looking through the other side at the sunglasses, there should be little change. This is because a circular polarizer starts out with an ordinary polarizer on the outside (facing the subject) and a quarter wave plate on the inside (facing the camera) which converts polarized light to circularly polarized light, which looks unpolarized as far as reflections off mirror surfaces are concerned (which is important for proper operation of your DSLR).

 

If you have an LCD monitor on your computer, try looking at that through your polarizer.

 

It's possible, although I've never heard of it before, that the filter was put into the ring backwards. This would give you a negligible change in sky darkness as you rotate the filter.

 

Sky light is polarized by scattering, and the light scattered at 90 degrees is most highly polarized. The sky light near the sun or directly opposite the sun is almost completely unpolarized. If you're shooting subjects with the sun behind you, you will see no change in the sky light.