D800 write to card delay

My experience of the issue is the same as Alex’s, no obvious pattern, just once in a while you’d get the hourglass instead of the image you’ve just taken. You can take another photo in the meantime but the hourglass stays. I end up then switching it on and off and it clears itself.

Just to be clear on this folks, this is not about buffers! It occurs whether you have taken one shot or a series, and occurs randomly.

It happened to me today with a fully charged battery.

It's not happened to me in 13 days of continuous shooting (tho' I've a sticky shutter release and a depressing tendency to change my settings unexpectedly with the sub-command wheel...).

Shannon Conway has had it happen, but not (I think) last week.

I'm impressed by a battery lasting for a week by the way: four dives was the most that I got...

PMed you Tim!

I have had the same problem with my D800. I can´t find any special reason. But what I have notice is at for me it only happends when I have to cards in the camara. (one CF, one SD). With only the SD card I have not had this problem so far. Have to try more with just SD card to be sure.

Well, I received my camera back from Nikon UK with diagnosis of ‘No Fault Found, may be card problem but testing not possible as card not supplied’.

I was told by Nikon that when I return it I should not include the card or the battery, so that was nice.

I have had the "hourglass" intermittently on my d800E both above and below the surface. Running latest firmware, lexar 1000x cards (mostly 32gb occasionally a 15 or a 64GB. Turning the camera off and then on clears the problem and allows reshooting. This can happen with single shots or bursts.

The Swedish two-card syndrome might be the explanation. I only got it for the first time on my last trip when I had two cards in the camera.

Hi folks,

I am in contact with Nikon UK about this.

A soon as I have any comments from them, I will post here. In the meantime though, if anyone else is having the problem, or has any suggestions, I would love to hear about them

All the best

Adam

Unfortunately, this is an intermittent problem and cannot be immediately repeatable. I suspect this is a card compatibility issue. If it were a camera issue, it'd be more repeatable. I just gave up on the D800 but never had the issue other than earlier when it first came out.

It is fairly repeatable on my camera!

I disagree, the number of folks above who are having the issue with a wide variety of card types, must mean this is a camera issue. Please note that the problem occurs when shooting single frames, often as the first frame when the camera has not been "active" for a while-it is not related to write speeds in burst modes.

Let's see what Nikon say.

Adam

Adam, did you see my post above?, NIKON UK told me there was no fault with my camera and returned it to me.

I'm guessing this could be a related issue which I read about back in May:

http://www.pdnonline.com/gear/Nikon-Investigating--5632.shtml

Alex, DPReview did mention it in several threads:

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3183623

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3190131

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3237449

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/post/50371875

The consensus seems to indicate it's the cards, especially the SD cards. Has anyone tried using the CF card only?

Hi Alex-not prejudging what will happen, but there is Nikon UK and then there is Nikon UK! By avoiding going through the retail chain, I am in contact with Nikon technical direct,

Adam

I am sure I always had a SD card in slot 2 when I had the problem.

Nice one Adam, tell them on my behalf then that I could do with a Nikon D600 please

I have been using the CF card only until my last trip when I added a 16Gb SDHC card for overflow and guess what? I had the problem for the first time!

I can't try it now that I sold my D800. But if people try SD only and CF only and see if they can replicate the issue. Also another issue is which card.

No issues with any make of CF card up to 16GB (all I have). However, ocasional issue when 16GB SDHC card in slot 2, usually when writing to that card after CF is full, if I remember rightly. I hope this helps.

This seems like a "classic" interrupt Issue/problem. It generally seems to happen intermittent out of the blue!

The Processor is busy with someother task and suddenly a higher order interrupt comes, which create problems.

Generally, the workaround is a time out or a a reboot.

I could imagine that there is a collision of the interupts of the 2 cards. Hence, by only using 1 card the problem is reduced or gone.

These type of problems are a pain to debug. Since, the main problem is to find out under exact which circumstance the problem occurs.