We consider the evolution of double-diffusive finger convection for a two-solute (salt-sucrose) system in a Hele-Shaw cell. A high-resolution, full-field, light transmission technique was used to study the development of the instability that resulted from layering a lighter sucrose solution over a denser salt solution. The buoyancy ratio (Rp), which is a ratio of fluid density contributions by the two solutes and defines the degree of system disequilibrium, was varied systematically from conditions that were nearly stable (Rp=2.8) to those that were moderately unstable (Rp=1.4). In all experiments, fingers are found to form continuously throughout time, from a finger generation zone that straddles the location of the initial interface between solutions. At low Rp, fingers develop rapidly, merge with adjacent fingers, and grow far beyond the finger generation zone through a series of finger conduits. In the higher Rp experiments, fingers are slower to evolve, do not interact as dynamically, and do not grow far beyond the generation zone. Solute mass fluxes at low Rp quickly reach a constant many times greater than that of a purely diffusive system; at high Rp, mass fluxes decay as t-1/2 and behave diffusively but with effective diffusion coefficients much greater than those for molecular diffusion. ¿ 2001 American Geophysical Union