[jyl]

Hey, I'm looking for advice on my daughter's purchase of a used Nikon D200.

This is my 15 y/o daughter's purchase. She's been working some this summer (busing tables at a friends' restaurant, doing an internship at a design studio) and has saved up enough to buy a DSLR, so she's looking for one that will take all my MF lenses - which means something in the Nikon D# or D### line. Well, a D200 with a Dx kit lens is in her budget. (The D700 is not.)

So, I'm going to look at a couple on local Craigslist for her.

Question 1: Is there a self-test or diagnostic that I can run on the camera? If I can't be confident of being able to identify a fully-functional one, I may just buy from KEH instead.

Question 2: Is there a serial number range to seek or avoid, anything like that?

Question 3: Is there any way to check shutter actuations on the camera? Apparently every used DSLR out there has "about 10,000 actuations", hmm, but I don't know of any way to check that besides reading EXIF data from an image.

Question 4: If the seller has the camera, memory card, charger, and battery, that's all she needs to take pics and , right? There's not some Nikon software disc that she'll need to buy?

(I'm liking this idea that my daughter wants to work and buy things for herself. I may talk to her about paying for her eventual car . . . )