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Is it just me or are there so many conflicting reviews out there its not funny.

In the last week I've been researching d200 noise levels and have read dozens of reviews. UK magazine "Practical Photography" have a tagline "reviews you can trust" and say that the noise levels are very acceptable and yet other net based reviews say that the d200 is appalling over 400iso.

How do you know which reviews are nikon biased, or nikon sponsered?

And then there's the whole debate as to what raw processor to use. I've been using bibble pro on the mac this week but have already had 4 crashes. Because of this I'm researching other options - but every review I read contradicts the previous one.

I know the truth is out there but where can it be found. There's so much misinformation out there.

Oh well..... I suppose the best way of finding out is to test things yourself but this isn't always possible.

jben_net wrote:And then there's the whole debate as to what raw processor to use. I've been using bibble pro on the mac this week but have already had 4 crashes. Because of this I'm researching other options - but every review I read contradicts the previous one.

Running it on Linux, I haven't experienced any crashes with the latest version. See this thread on the BibbleLabs forums, re: crashing on a Mac, may help:

http://support.bibblelabs.com/webboard/ ... php?t=4217

cheers,

André

I go with reviewers who post actual samples and graphs. Then I read a lot of them and try to work out who's talking sense. One useful thing is to try doing a test with the gear you have. I did some comparisons with the Canon 300D vs 30D when I got it, and it was quite useful but also showed that it can be hard to see even major differences when looking at real life shots. Of course, that relies on being able to borrow a D200

FWIW, my impression is that compared to the Canon 30D the D200 is not quite as good over 400ISO, but it's a very long way from unusable. You've still got about the same usable dynamic range as the 30D (~8 stops without tweaking) and depending on who you talk to only a stop or so less than the 5D.

Unless you're really keen on big prints of low light shots I wouldn't worry, and if you are... buy one of the Canon 1D's. Sorry about that.

I can't really answer the part about D200 noise, but I can offer an opinion on the RAW converter.

All of the images in my flickr account have been post processed and converted from RAW in Apple's Aperture program - and I've found that it's pretty good for version 1 software.

Aperture now supports D200 raw as of yesterday (10.4.6 update adds compatibility)

daniel_r wrote:All of the images in my flickr account have been post processed and converted from RAW in Apple's Aperture program - and I've found that it's pretty good for version 1 software.

Daniel,

These look great!!

I havent really used Aperture in anger yet other than for doing inital selection as my graphics card isnt up to snuff. How are you finding the editing tools?? Have you done any printing from your Aperture images as yet and do you do any roundtripping to PS?

Cheers
Rob.

i have a d200 and i love it.

my pics might not be great example because im still clueless when it comes dslr but my earlier post would give you an idea. take a look at the pics. i think most likely its user fault, that being me.

i noticed few other pics where i got everything spot on didn't require post processing in photoshop and had very very low noise.


having said that im happy with nikon d200


From my earlier posting and more can be found here http://www.dslrusers.com/viewtopic.php? ... highlight= :
all images have been cropped to accentuate the cars. im new to photography, just got my d200 last month but ive been using photoshop since ver 3 (I think I started with 2.8.3). im web designer by profession and i use photshop at work along with other tools. i think I got decent skills with photoshop and i can manipulate most images.

sorry for posting soo any images.
let me know if you'd like me post smilar images for one with schumi helmet.

this the view from my seat at 200mm using 70-200 vr. i focused on fosters logo as reference and moved my lens to the centre of the track. as I couldn’t see the car coming my only cue was the sound of car approaching the last corner but it wasn’t like that always because it could pit or go in the last corner to compete the lap


before


after post processing in photoshop. probably under 5 minutes. the image was shot in raw but the correction i made could have been easily done in jpeg as well.


100% crop – very noisy d200. most likely my fault?

Reviews are the personal opinion of the reviewer - exactly the same as the critique offered on this forum for submitted pics - some will say ”wow” and others might say ”why did you bother”?