Or “The Sad Tale of my Nikon D200 and Nikkor 70-200”

It is with a mix of fondness and sadness that I greet today's one-year anniversary of having gotten my Nikon D200. The sadness is because it and all my lenses are in the shop again. )-:

The problems started when I got my new Nikkor 70-200 zoom and found that it had focus issues. So, I brought it and all my kit to the Nikon Service Center in Osaka. (“kit” is geeky-photographer speak for “photography equipment” — doesn't it make me sound like such a pro? :-)). They accepted the lens and the body for repair, sending it back to me a week later.

Unfortunately, I got it back in worse shape than when I brought it in. Before, I believe that the body and my other lenses were properly calibrated, and only the 70-200 was in need of adjustment, but at the service center, they calibrated the body to match the wrongly-calibrated lens, so now those two worked together better (but still not great), but in doing this my other properly-calibrated lenses no longer worked. Sigh. At least, that's what seems to be the case.

It really astounds me that a company like Nikon can make a mistake like this (so much so that I hold out plenty of space that I might be wrong in my assessment of the situation... time will tell.) Still, my first clue that all was not right in Nikon land was at the service center when I explained the situation to the lady at the reception counter. She said "you can calibrate the body for one lens, but you can't expect the body to be perfect will all lenses." I had in front of me a $2,000 semi-pro body, two $2,300 pro-level lenses, and an $800 lens, and at those prices, I damn well expected them to work perfectly.

Anyway, I trekked back to Osaka last week, made sure to talk to a different person at reception, and had them take everything and said clearly that I wanted them to all work properly, and suggested that the problem was with the 70-200. They apologized profusely, and gave me a target date of Jan 22 to have them back to me. They beat the target date last time by a week, so if that holds again, I should get them back later this week....