I was so frustrated at the basketball game I was shooting last night. I had my Nikon D200 all ready to go for tipoff. I had the two centers all framed like I wanted and started to focus in preparation for the jump ball and my battery indicator flashed that my battery was dead.
I missed the jump ball.
So I go over to my bag, pull out my spare (I have 4) and stick it in and walk to the baseline to setup for the next offensive series.
I get a couple of shots and wham – the battery indicator shows that my battery is out of juice. I turned my Nikon off and turned it back on and my battery showed full power again. I shot another 4-5 images and it happened again – my battery showed that it was dead.
Short story – all four batteries had the same issue. I usually shoot a couple of hundred images during a high school basketball game. Last night, I shot about 40 before I gave up and just watched the game.
This started to happen a couple of months ago, but never like last night. The first time it happened, I thought my battery had died (@#%@#@ – there goes another $45), so I bought 2 more because I was getting ready to travel and didn’t want to have battery problems while shooting on the road.
It progressively got worse and worse until last night.
Today, I called Nikon. Apparently, this is a known issue and they had a firmware upgrade for the Nikon D200 camera that takes both the A and B Channels from 2.0 to 2.01.
I upgraded tonight and we will see what happens tomorrow when I shoot another High School basketball game.
I am happy that it was firmware so I don’t have to send my camera to Nikon to get fixed, but I wonder how come everything worked for over a year and then finally started to have the problem. That doesn’t make sense in my mind. But I am happy to have it “fixed.”
I will post again if the new firmware did not fix the problem.
For those with Nikon D200 cameras, login to nikon.com and get the firmware update. You will be happy you did!
