Is the Nikon D200 banding really an issue?
Is the banding on the Nikon D200 really a problem? To some people yes, however to the majority no. If you can’t see any banding at the 100% crop then it surely isn’t going to show up in your prints (less than A3) or in your reduced sized web postings. On top of that, a study found that 80% of people don’t even print their own images.
Here’s an interesting quote from Ken Rockwell on the Nikon D200 banding issue.
“Every time a new camera comes out there are those who have to jerk it around looking for problems more than I’ve been jerked around by the used car department at Irvine BMW. I respect and admire camera hackers’ curiosity; however they often discover effects which are insignificant for actual photography. Once they post them on the Internet these scare others who don’t understand how hard the hackers have to work to see these things.
It’s such a non-issue I’d never have found it if I hadn’t tried to repeat it out of curiosity. I’ve made over 8,000 shots with my D200 and have never seen this except for when I tried to reproduce it.
The D70’s non-issue was an infinitesimal hue shift only slightly visible at 1/8,000 of a second at ISO 200, which of course was a condition under which no one would ever photograph.
The D200’s non-issue happens if you severely overexpose (blow out) a large portion of the image at ISO 400. When viewed at 100% there may be a mild vertical striping, banding or corduroy effect in moderately exposed sections. You have to blow out a large portion of the image in exactly the right way to cast exactly the right striped veil over the darker parts of the image. Images that show this striping are so blown out that my grandma would be smart enough to delete them in the camera before she ever got to looking for this nuance on her computer at 100%. Even then these bands only appear under just the right combination of bad exposure.
It’s all the same effect although different people call it banding, striping or corduroy. This striping almost looks like a much more subtle version Mac OSX 10.1’s gray horizontal stripes which I always liked. “
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