Nikon D200 tethered Windows support

Question

I've seen a few requests on this forum for tethered support of the Nikon D200 in Lightroom for Windows. Will it ever happen or is the demand to low? I can use freeware programs with tethered support in Windows, so I know it's possible. Unfortunately those programs don't even come close to Lightroom. Any feedback or timetable?

Answer 1

I have read that Camera Control Pro 2 works with LR3, but I do not have that version, so I can not confirm it if works. Version 2 was a significant cost to upgrade and from what I understand was mostly about the addition camera support and things like Live View support.
The original Nikon Camera Control Pro cost less, was available for a long time in parrallel as and alternative choice to CCP V.2 and was one way to get LR2 to work tethered. However, even with CCP and LR2 it was a bit of an awkward hack with a number of moving parts, but it does work.
I have the trial version of LR3 on a separate machine and I tried to install Camera Control Pro onto that machine (after LR3 had been installed) and the CCP install complains about another version on the machine which needs to be uninstalled first... my guess is that LR3 install some Nikon dll that CCP doesn't like (probably newer). I have never installed CCP onto the current build of this machine so that is why I am guessing it it LR3 that it is sensing. So now what worked for me with LR2 does not seem to work with LR3.
Unfortunately since LR3 doesn't support my D200 under Windows, I have not been able to try the native LR3 tethering support... but my guess would be that the native support would be much cleaner and therefore a preferable method over the CCP + LR approach, and definetely superior to no tethering in LR3 using the D200 on Windows at all.
Camera Control Pro is just and expensive way to interface your camera to the computer via USB and software.  This is why the idea of LR3 having native support was so appealing. Upgrading to CCP V.2 just to use LR3 is not at all appealing.
I have just started to experiment with LR3 Trial and although I am starting to find some nice improvements, I find the lack of tethering options using my D200 and LR3 rather frustrating. Adobe seemed to think tethering was important enough to add to LR3 (which I would agree) but I don't understand why they felt that support for the Nikon D200 on Windows was not important. I don't have any numbers available to me, but I would expect that there are a lot of D200's out there. The model is obviously aging a bit now, but being a pro model of camera I would bet that even those photographers who have upgraded that many of them probably still use there D200 as a secondary or back up camera. Many of them will be very pissed if they find themselves in a situation where they have been working tethered with their newer Nikon and suddenly when they go to use their D200 as a back up only to discover that LR3 doesn't work with their pro Nikon backup camera in tethered mode.
So even if it was just an oversight or a bad judment call on Adobe's part to not support D200 in the LR3 beta, or the release version of LR3 for Windows, or the first minor version update to LR3.2, I really hope that they have plans to add support in the next minor release
for the D200 under windows.
I know my first reaction when I saw that support was missing in the beta was that oh well, that sucks but I expect that by the time they release LR3 they will ad full support for the rest of the Nikon line, so I will wait and check out LR3 later. Well it is later now and support is still not there. So it will be interesting to see how many D200 owners who might not have said anything during the beta, speak up now. I wonder how many it will take before Adobe thinks it is a high enough priority item to address.