Try some using a tripod. One of the prime destroyers of sharpness is camera movement. It will reduce the sharpest lens and most accurate focus to mush.
In 35mm photography, there is a rule of thumb on shutter speeds. The minimum speed one should attempt to hand hold is 1/focal length. Therefor if one is shooting with a 200mm lens, anything below 1/200th of a second gets chancey. Since the D200 has a 1.5x cropping factor, that would translate into 1/300th for a 200mm lens. Obviously, the longer the focal length, the more difficult it is to hold the camera perfectly steady. The VR lens should grant you at least two or three EV slower shutter speeds with VR working. However, it has its limits too.
It is the nature of digital imaging that sharpening is pretty much universally required. The sensor is a mosaic of tiny photosites usually with red, green and blue filters. They read the colour information for each pixel from slightly offset positions, plus there is generally an anti-aliasing filter over them. With film, all colours are read by layers sensitive to red, green and blue. Since they are layers, they read the colours at the same axis spot relative to the film's dimensions.
I really have never liked the sharpening built into any camera I have used, or any scanner for that matter. I keep it turned off, and apply it to images in Photoshop, optimizing it for the needs of the individual image. I get very good results in Lab colour mode.
Lab mode deals with lightness and colour independently. If one sharpens in RGB mode - in camera or in Photoshop - it tends to put bright desaturated haloes around detail and the picture looks "sharpened" rather than sharp.
Go into Lab mode [Image->Mode->Lab Color].
Select the Lighness channel either from the Channel Palette or by hitting [Ctrl+1]. You should see a B&W image.
Select the Unsharp Mask filter [Filter->Sharpen->Unsharp Mask] and set the threshold to zero, the radius to 0.25 (yes, sub-pixel level) and the amount to the minimum to make the image look sharp. This is generally between 100 and 500 depending upon a whole slew of factors. Use the least that will do the job. Return to all channels either through the palette or [Ctrl+~]
Film accutance is defined as edge contrast - it is what makes film look sharp far more than high resolution. This closely resembles the look of accutance and makes the image look sharp rather than sharpened. Since you sharpen ONLY the lighteness channel, the colour channels retain their colour and saturation.
This method will not save a shot with terminal motion blur however, though it may help a bit. The key is to keep your shutter speeds up when shooting on location. Use a tripod or monopod as much as possible, and if not possible try to rest your hands on something or even lean against a wall, post or tree for added steadiness. Do careful testing with the VR lens, to determine what the actual limits are at various focal lengths. In fact the first thousand or so shots with a new digital body should be devoted to testing and fine tuning the settings to your preferences and requirements.
Always be aware of your shutter speed. Over the decades unless shooting with manual cameras, I have shot almost exclusively on aperture priority, which will always give me the highest possible shutter speed in any situation. Even so, I am always aware what the shutter speed is.
larry!
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