DIGITAL CORNER
By Bob Dean
Sensor Cleaning:
A number of members asked about sensor cleaning, so the Digital Corner did some research.
We got 1.1 million hits on a Google™ search of “sensor cleaning digital cameras”. We also queried Nikon’s™ and Canon’s™ websites. There are two schools of thought. Canon™ and Nikon™ say use clean, dry air from a squeeze bulb. Don’t use compressed air or anything that touches the sensor. (Actually you can’t really touch the sensor; the surface that is exposed is the optical low pass filter that’s over the sensor itself.)
The other school of thought was summarized in about 35 pages of text and images on the website http://www.cleaningdigitalcameras.com/ . This site is number one on the Google™ search. It is a very good reference on all of the methods, with pros and cons spelled out clearly. Our conclusion is that if you can’t clean all of those annoying blotches and dust spots using an air bulb, you can be very brave (or maybe cavalier) and use one of the methods mentioned on the website, OR you can take your camera to a professional and let someone else assume the liability.
Once you have it clean, there are a few good rules of thumb for keeping it clean. Don’t change lenses in a dusty environment, minimize the amount of time the camera is exposed to the open air w/o a lens installed, etc. Sorry there are no magic formulas, but like everything else in photography, there are always tradeoffs!