Nikon D200 Performance

Startup & Shutter Lag
The Nikon D200 is a very responsive camera by any measure, but we were a bit surprised to find that its shutter lag in full autofocus mode was somewhat slower than that of either the D2x or the original D100. The camera goes from power on to first shot almost instantly (less than 0.2 seconds anyway, which is about the limit that we can measure for this particular parameter), so there are definitely no complaints there. Full-autofocus shutter lag with the 18-70mm kit lens attached and with review turned on is about 0.25 second, with LCD review turned off it drops to 0.21 second. This is certainly faster than most photographer's reflexes, and is on par with most professional dSLRs currently on the market, but is a bit off the pace of the original D100, as well as the D2x. It's possible that the 18-70mm lens is a little slower at communicating with the camera than the 24-85 we used with the D100 or whatever lens we tested the D2x with (which we unfortunately neglected to record), so the observed difference may not be significant. In any case, the 0.21-0.25 second lag we measured for the D200 compares very well the numbers we came up with for the Canon EOS-1D Mark II (0.20 - 0.24 sec) and EOS-30D (0.24 sec).

The good news with the D200 though, is that its shutter response was very fast indeed (0.057 sec) in continuous AF mode (with a stationary subject), manual focus, or prefocused. This is just a hair slower (13 msec) than the D2x, on par with the 1Ds Mark II, somewhat faster than the EOS-30D, and far faster than the D100.

Continuous Mode Speed and Buffer Capacity
The Nikon D200 has two continuous modes, a high-speed option that shoots at about 5 frames/second, and a low-speed mode that can be set to shoot at 1, 2, 3, or 4 frames/second. Our tests revealed that the frame rate is quite accurate in low-speed mode, and that its high-speed continuous mode is dead-on 5.0 frames/second. Buffer capacity depends on the file format and (in compressed formats) on the subject content to some extent, but is fairly generous all around. Shooting uncompressed RAW (NEF format) images, the D200 can capture 21 successive frames without having to wait for the memory card to catch up. While it can take it 37 seconds (or longer, with slower memory cards) to fully flush those 21 frames to the card, the D200's efficient system architecture lets you start shooting again as soon as the buffer has space to spare, and the 5 fps shooting rate is unaffected by the ongoing background processing associated with card writing.

At its highest JPEG size/quality setting (but with the compression set to "size priority") at 1600 ISO, the D200 can capture 24 images of a worst-case noise pattern (which compresses very poorly), but more on the order of 30-40 frames with more typical subjects. At its low-resolution setting, it can capture essentially unlimited frames with a reasonably fast memory card. Note that while the shots-remaining counter in the viewfinder starts counting down from 25 frames, we found that worst-case subject matter could result in only 24 frames being captured at full rate - There was a perceptible delay before capturing the 25th frame. Do note though, that this was an absolutely worst-case test: The combination of a fine-grained noise pattern as the target, and shooting at ISO 1600 (which increases image noise significantly) makes for images that compress fairly poorly in JPEG. Shooting more normal subjects at ISOs of 200 and under resulted in buffer capacities of 30-40 frames or better.

The combination of shooting speed and buffer capacity is quite impressive, handily beating most if not all of its competition. It's safe to say that very few photographers will find themselves limited by the Nikon D200's shooting speed, buffer depth, or file-handling capabilities.

Download Speed
The D200 is also very fast when it comes to offloading images onto a computer. We clocked our test unit at 4,386 KBytes/second when downloading a collection of JPEG images to our Sony VAIO desktop computer. (A 2.4 GHz Pentium IV with a high-speed USB 2.0 port.) You'll likely get even slightly faster transfer rates with RAW images, as Windows is quicker when handling fewer, larger files than it is with more, smaller ones. Regardless, the D200 is extremely fast when it comes to downloading images, greatly reducing the need for an external card reader.