I have been using a D700 for several years, and the behavior of Live View is now intuitive to me. With the D800, things are quite different and perplexing.

With the D700, I rotate the dial to Lv. Then when I press the shutter release, the mirror goes up, and the monitor comes on. When I then press the shutter release half way, the monitor turns off, and when I fully press it the image is recorded, the info is displayed (thumbnail, histogram, etc.) for a few seconds, and when that clears the monitor returns to live view.

With the D800, when I press the Lv button, the mirror goes up and the monitor comes on (so far, so good). When I press the shutter release, the monitor goes off and the image is (I presume) recorded. There then follows a period of about 8 or 9 seconds when the monitor is off, the mirror remains up, and neither pressing the shutter release nor the Lv button elicits in any response. (In Cl or Ch mode I can take multiple images as long as the shutter release is pressed, but afterwords the same 8 or 9 second "pause" is once again in effect.) After the 8 or 9 second pause, the monitor comes on showing the info for a few seconds, followed by a return to live view.

I don't see anything in the manual about this. Is this the expected behavior?

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What speed memory card are you using? If the green light is on during this period of inactivity, it may simply be writing to the card.
Dave Jolley

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I think you hit the nail on the head, Dave. Thanks.

I am using a SanDisk Extreme 60MB/s 32GB CF and a SanDisk Ultra 20MB/s 32GB SDHC card. When I use the CF as primary and the SDHC as overflow, the green light = monitor blank time goes to almost nothing. If I switch primary and secondary, the write time is almost, but not quite, as long as my earlier setting. All of this makes sense.

Originally, I was running with CF as primary and SDHC as backup. This seems to mean that they are both written to in serial fashion. Even with CF RAW and SDHC JPEG the write time is significant.

So I'm wondering what other folks do with the two card slots. I figured it was good to have a backup, but then again I never lost an image still in the camera with my D700, so do I really need a backup?

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I use the second slot for "overflow" just in case I am in a shooting frenzy and use all of the primary capacity . (Hasn't happened yet, but then again I haven't run into Pamela Anderson on the street yet either)

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