Hi all,

I have had a D200 for about eight months, and while I generally love it, it
has been plagued with a disturbing number of problems.

First was the long banding--I believe they replaced the sensor to fix that,
but afterward pixels started dying. First I had three dead pixels remapped,
then two months later I found about 20 new ones, which were remapped. Now, a
month later I am finding more. Has anyone else experienced anything like
this?

But the latest and greatest weirdness became apparent recently when I tried
to do a longish exposure--about 3 minutes--of the African night sky. I was
shocked to find that all four corners and the top of the frame were luminous
pink--looking like light-struck film. And the whole frame was studded with
scores of dead-looking pixels of different sizes in white, red and blue. But
they weren't dead; at shorter exposure times they behaved normally, with
more and more being "blown out" and luminescing as the exposure lengthened.
There were a few at 30 secs., more at one minute, and a whole lot more at 3
mins. I didn't have the courage to test further...Likewise the pink fringing
started at about 1 minute and grew progressively worse at longer exposure
times.

Obviously this is going back to Nikon, but I am wondering how many D200
exemplars might suffer from this kind of defect, which is not obvious in
most shooting situations. If you have a D200 and the time and inclination
please try this: Go in a dark room, put a body cap on to stop any light from
entering at the front, and perhaps the cap on the eyepiece as well, and do a
3 minute exposure at ISO 1600. I would be interested in hearing about the
results.

TIA,

Toby