I just came back from the Sea of Cortez (La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico) and this marked the first time that I took the D200 underwater in my new Ikelite housing (with dual Nikon SB-105s in manual mode). The short version - LOVED IT!!!!!
(Not to rub it in, but many of you may recall that my sister bought me the D200 as a Christmas gift last year. She also bought me the housing as a birthday gift. What a nice sister, huh???)
I've been shooting with a D70 in an Ikelite housing and the D200 housing has the same general feel. There are a few more controls inside so it's a little tighter to manuever the camera, once secured to the back/tray, into the housing, but not a problem at all. And all those buttons and knobs that require care when loading the camera give you access to just about every camera feature underwater.
The two things I was concerned about were the positioning of the sync cord bulkhead and the location of the shutter release lever.
On my D70, the bulkhead connector angles down and left, so when I attach the sync cable, I can run it under the handle tray and it's pretty much out of the way. On the D200, the bulkhead is angled up and left, which means the cable sort of runs over the back of your left hand when youre gripping the handles. Not a big deal, but I like the positioning on the D70 better.
The shutter release turned out not to be a problem at all. It's almost flush against a knob (on the right side) that is the aperture control. My concern was that in trying to fire, if my finger slid too far across the lever, it would hit the aperture knob and I wouldn't trip the shutter when I wanted to. (I even played with the idea of extending the lever a bit downward.) But this proved really not to be an issue. I still wouldn't mind more clearance, but it was easy to get used to.
I LOVED the larger LCD viewing screen. I also found that setting the screen brightness at -2 was better than 0 as it gave me visually a closer representation of what the histrogram was showing. (I did a comparison between the camera and my laptop, with two different editing program histograms running on the laptop for reference.) At a 0 brightness (the default), images that might be a little dark look okay and you have a tendency not to believe the histogram. (Yes, it's correctable in post but I'm one of those who would like to get the image right to begin with and have to do minimal tweaking on the backend.)
It also seemed to me that the D200 gave me better exposures (and somewhat faster focusing) than the D70 did. Especially with shots of divers, I wasn't having issues with blowing out the skin tones while getting the rest of the frame properly/hopefully exposed correctly.
I also like the knob that allowed me to open the CF card door without detaching the camera from the mounting plate. Nice touch and made it fairly convenent to download my images (I use a 4GB card and generally crank out anywhere from 100-200 images per dive - shoot highest-quality JPG, not RAW) after every dive or two.
I did have one issue that I'm not sure if it was design problem or me. But I've never had this happen before on previous Ikeite housings (afoementioned D70 and an N90 before that).
On my sixth dive, the flashes fired for the first three shots, then stopped. Ready lights were on so it looked like they were okay. As my hand ran over the sync cord/bulkhead connector, I realized it had become partially unscrewed/loosened. I have no idea how this happened. But there's nothing like screwing this back together at 60 feet and hoping for the best.
When I got back on the boat, I unscrewed it, and - sure enough - the bulkhead was flooded. However, it didn't seem to intrude into the hosuing itself. And the sync cord didn't look too bad. In fact, once I dried everything out and plugged it back it, the flashes fired as I made the connection but wouldn't fire when the shutter was despressed. I assumed there might still be water inside the bulkhead shorting things out.
I brought out the D70 housing (which I'd brought as a insurance/backup), plugged in the sync cord, hooked up the D70, and everything fired fine. Hooked up the D200 to the D70 back, and it also worked perfectly. So it seemed that the problem was in the bulkhead connector on the D200 back.
We looked at it again and it seemed like the bulkhead connector was sealed from the housing itself. And since it was flooded already, it didn;'t seem like we could do any more damage. So I gambled that there was just a little water left inside, took some alcohol out and filled up the bulkhead with it, and let it sit for 5 minutes, hoping it would force the water out. And . . . voila!!!! . . . once I dumped out the alcohol and dried the bulkhead out again, I plugged the sync cord back in and all was right with the world. Whew!!!
(I'll avoid the story about the battery that leaked inside one of the SB-105s, but I was apparently able to save that one too.)
Anyhow, I loved the combo. Shooting with both the housing and the camera was a joy. If you'd like to take a peek at some of the images, they're up on our website (topside images were taken with the D70):
http://www.reefseekers.com/PIXPAGES/BAJA20...006%20(pix).htm .
- Ken
