|
Nikon
D200 User's Guide
© 2006 KenRockwell.com
I bought mine from Ritz here. I bought another D200 from Adorama here. Also try Amazon here. Adorama usually has D200/18-70 kits in stock here. It helps me keep adding to this site when you click these links to get yours.
CUSTOM
SETTING MENU
(pencil icon)
Want free live phone support? In the USA, call (800) NIKON-UX, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
How to Get Here
Press MENU, go to the left and select up and down to the pencil icon. You'll then see CUSTOM SETTING MENU on the color LCD.
What it Does
The Custom Setting Menu is primarily concerned with the camera's mechanics and meters and timers and focus etc.
Nikon has subdivided these various menu functions into groups, and color coded them as Autofocus, Metering/Exposure, Timers/AE&AF Lock, Shooting/Display, Bracketing/Flash and Controls. The seemingly unrelated things separated by slashes (/) are Nikon's grouping.
I use Nikon's names as headers for each section, so please excuse me if they make little sense. I explain each function and it's choices in simple English in the text which follows each entry.
What I Change
I change a zillion things, all explained on the next pages where I detail each subsection of this menu on its own page.
Complaints and Organization
Nikon is pretty sloppy about naming and organizing the menus, sorry.
This menu is also all about shooting, just like the Shooting Menu. It's tricky to remember if something is in the Shooting Menu or the Custom Setting Menu.
I would rename these. If I did, I'd rename the Custom Setting Menu as the Camera Menu and the Shooting Menu as the Film Menu.
If you're a camera hacker or Nikon I'd love to help you redo these. The menu items need to be reorganized and renamed.
I use my D200 daily and rarely can remember in what menu Nikon has hidden what. Instead I use the Recent Settings Menu and hope it's remembered there.
[C] Bank Select: There are four selectable memory locations which store all the settings in this menu. They are called A, B, C and D. You may add your own names to them for convenience. I call my A "NORMAL," and I call D "Remote Flash." I don't use B or C. I have no idea why there is another [C] to the left of it in the menu.
Nikon did another bone-headed thing by naming the Shooting Menu Banks A, B, C and D and then using the same names (A, B, C and D) for these Custom Menu Banks. They should use 1, 2, 3 and 4 for one of them to prevent confusion. Don't worry: I have an engineering degree and these confuse me, too.
Since there are so many things to reset to get remote flash to work, and then to turn it off, that I saved them in one of these presets.
If you have anything set away from the defaults you'll see CUSTOM and A, B, C or D on the top LCD. Regardless of which is selected, if all the defaults are selected (you can do that with Reset below) you won't see CUSTOM on the top LCD.
There is no "SAVE" command. The bank you have selected is updated immediately as you change settings. If you've never selected one then you've been working in the A bank.
You can save names for each, but you can't lock any of these banks. If you have a bank you don't want altered, don't shoot actively with it. Anytime you change anything in the Custom Setting Menu you are changing the settings of whichever bank you have selected. To save a Bank you must work in another, since there's no way to lock them. Nikon confuses us all by letting us save names which stay locked while the settings wander all over the place as we change them in shooting.
[R] Menu Reset resets everything in the selected Custom Shooting Menu Bank (just described above) to the defaults. The next six pages describe all the settings affected. Reset only affects the bank in which you're working.
Play with everything below to your heart's content, since if you screw anything up this reset will fix it. Choose a bank you don't use and you won't change the bank you do use.
Once you hit YES it resets. It doesn't ask "are you sure?" first.
I've divided the rest of this menu into several pages because it's so long. I've divided it up as Nikon did in its own submenus.
PLUG
My D200 User's Guide continues below.
It took me two months to write this D200 User's Guide. No one pays me anything. If you find it as helpful as a book you might have had to buy or a workshop you may have had to take, feel free to help me share more.
Thanks!
Ken
Back to Top of D200 User's Guide
KNOBS and BUTTONS
MENUS
a Autofocus < < NEXT