I really don't find my 18-55 is fast enough and the corner sharpness is not good.

F2.8 would be very good in dark situations/indoors and for shallow DoF.



Well, you ask what is special about it, it is a constant F2.8 zoom, that is the main reason for getting it. If you don't need a fast lens then all the better as you save a good bit of money. Prices are not linear with improvement in quality though.

Perfect, extra edge goes a long way.

I don't see why such a question needs asking...

The main reason to get it is the F2.8 aperture, that makes a huge difference. Weather sealing and SDM are a bonus really. As the top of the range glass resolution should be more consistent across the zoom range, with little vignette and CA. Nice and sharp high resolution capabilities and good bokeh are also what should be expected.

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1036&thread=24143227

Well they are on their way, shame you can't gauge the quality from his shots as two are underexposed and the other is sharp but has no accessible EXIF.

I'm waiting for a reply so I can post a comparison. No reply yet...

Can't have been too bad, the flash has a blue hue so it should balance a little...

Did you shoot JPEG though?




I'd post some pictures of the banding but I don't have his permission. Didn't think anything that bad could make it past QC.

...you 'ain't seen nothing 'til you see the D200!

I've just been sent some pictures from a party where my girlfriend's parents were celebrating their 50th birthdays together taken on a D200 at ISO200 with a flash (bounced) (her uncle took them).

I thought they'd be cleaner than the pictures I took without flash at ISO400 on my K10D. How wrong I was, there is a nice grid pattern on most of the photos in the highlights

I don't see banding unless I push an image to ISO3200 in PP from ISO1600 and sometimes at 1600 straight out of the camera.

I am very glad I didn't take up the offer for a D200 over the K10D.

I hope he can get it fixed as it is quite obvious in a good number of pictures. I'm not one for pixel peeping but it is quite obvious and can spoil an otherwise good picture.

The new mac would look nicer in all aluminium, don't like the black rim that much.

Was tempted to run a VM with Windows from Linux to run my Adobe software. But I'd need a second OEM licence (or a standard licence which is expensive) to do that.

VMs are very slow to run other software on. You really only want them for software development. With two or four processor cores things speed up a lot but you can still only do basic tasks.