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Nikon D200 Modes and Menus

Program AE: Lets the camera control the shutter speed and aperture settings, although you can vary its choices by turning the Command dial. (That is, you can increase or decrease the aperture the camera has chosen, and the camera will vary the shutter speed to maintain the same overall exposure value. Once you've chosen an offset in the aperture/shutter combination, the camera will continue to control the exposure automatically, while maintaining the aperture/shutter bias you've selected.) This ability to select a persistent bias for the exposure system is very useful, in many cases more so than conventional Aperture or Shutter Priority metering (see below). This is because the "tweaked" Program AE will track even radical changes in subject lighting, not being constrained to a single aperture or shutter speed.

Aperture Priority: Allows you to set the aperture value while the camera automatically selects the appropriate shutter speed. Available apertures will vary with the lens in use.

Shutter Speed Priority: Allows you to set the shutter speed value while the camera automatically selects the appropriate aperture. Shutter speeds range from 1/8,000 to 30 seconds in this mode.

Manual: Lets you select both the aperture value and shutter speed, and increases the shutter speed range to include a Bulb setting for exposures longer than 30 seconds.

Menus:

The menu system on the Nikon D200 is similar in layout to that of the D2x, but take better advantage of the high resolution LCD screen, with larger, smoother fonts and improved graphics. The end result is a much better readability and a more sophisticated appearance. There are four main menus: Playback, Shooting, CSM (custom menus) and Set Up. There's also a fifth Recent Settings option, which lists the 14 most recent setting adjustments made. Navigation takes place via the Four-way Arrow Pad, assisted at times by the Enter button. The menus themselves are chosen via a "tabbed" interface, with icons on the left of the screen corresponding to the four menus.

Whenever you're adjusting settings on the D200's Shooting or Custom Settings Menu (CSM for short), you're actually modifying the settings in a particular Shooting Menu Bank. There are four of these, with default names of A, B, C, and D. You can switch between them via the first menu entry on the Shooting Menu, and there's an option to rename the banks however you like. (Names can contain up to 20 characters, including letters, numbers, and a collection of common symbols.)

The Nikon D200 carries forward the help system of the D2x, but has expanded it to cover essentially every menu item. Whenever a menu item is selected that has a help screen associated with it, a square icon with a question mark on it appears in the lower lefthand corner of the screen. When you press the Protect/Help button, the LCD screen will display help information for that current menu selection. Most help screens are just a single page, but a few extend onto multiple pages. The explanations are pretty informative (better than average, we'd say), but there is still room for improvement on a number of the more arcane/involved settings. (Memory is so cheap these days, we don't know why Nikon didn't go the extra mile with an already good idea, and include much more information on some of the help screens. We suspect the help screens are actually read by only a minority of D200 shooters, but the incremental effort and expense to offer more complete explanations of more infrequently-used camera functions seems small relative to the time it could save for D200 owners, helping avoid trips back to the manual to ferret out the information.)

In the section below, rather than reproduce every menu screen in the main text, we've shown screenshots for only the top level of each menu, and provided clickable links in the descriptive text leading to the various sub-screens.

Playback Menu:

Shooting Menu:
(NOTE - in the following, an asterisk (*) denotes the default setting.)

Custom Settings Menu: The D200 divides the Custom Settings menu items into four main banks of settings. "a" is for autofocus, "b" for Metering/Exposure, "c" for Timers/AE&AF Lock, "d" for Shooting/Display, "e" for Bracketing/Flash, and "f" for Controls. Following are the options for each:

 

Setup Menu:

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