Thread: Sensor cleaning?

Originally Posted by rick130

....

Do I have a crack at it myself, or take it to an 'expert'?

You sound like a fairly capable bloke Rick .. don't waste money on sending it in.
That money easily gets you the right gear to keep it clean regularly.

What camera?
Not that it makes a huge difference, but it may.

First off, best tool to use is canned air, no matter what people have ever said about using the stuff.

Blowers are in effect useless. Reason is, they actually blow more dust onto the sensor, than the one large bit of fluff they're trying to remove.
Canned air, with a straw nozzle, will remove that dust every time.
What is important is that you never shake the can! this is where you can likely get residue onto the 'sensor'. as long as you don't shake can, or allow it to properly settle if it's been agitated, and don't hold can upside down while using it, canned air is fine.
And! .. even if you do get residue on the sensor, it's more easily cleaned off the sensor than is the dust itself(been there done that .. actually deliberately too tho!!).

If you really want it clean tho .. and that means properly dust free .. you need a wet clean kit, or some all in one wet clean one time use products.

what, if any, gear do you have to clean your camera yourself?
And, because of the design of almost all blowers, they aren't sensor cleaning devices. Use them to dust down the body and/or lenses, but not inside lenses either... ie. via the rear lens element.

Thanks for that.
Yep, I've read the "don't use canned air" comments in articlesarticles.
I actually have high purity nitrogen in the ute.

Hmm.

Oh, and not that it matters but it's a Fujifilm XT20 which has the same sensor as it's more exxy siblings.

I have been cleaning my own sensors for years without any problems. The swabs are a one use item, wipe one way the back the other then ditch it. You may want to keep a used swab for a first pass on a very dirty sensor. Well filtered compressed air is good for getting loose material out of the camera before swabbing the sensor. Of course, make sure you have the correct size swabs. Pete.

As long as there is no chance of any debris ejecting out of the compressed nitrogen 'system' shouldn't be an issue.
By that I mean, what nozzle device will be used, what conduit between compressed N and nozzle. If there is any chance that there is dust in the nozzle or air line, then it increases the chance that you spray more dust onto the sensor.
This is why I don't recommend using blower bulb type devices on sensor. The air pulled into the bulb(rocket blower or whatever brand, they're all the same) is just unfiltered ambient.
Then it's ejected via a narrow nozzle, which just concentrates the dust stream .. similarly to how it concentrates the air stream.

For those large curly worm type dust particles, I usually just whack the side of the camera at the grip .. many times over until it finally falls off. Usually does.
But that's if I'm out, and no access to my canned air

Originally Posted by rick130

Oh, and not that it matters but it's a Fujifilm XT20 which has the same sensor as it's more exxy siblings.

My curiosity on your camera was more about the type(in your case mirrorless) than the actual model.

Mirrorless are a little easier to clean than DSLR, but only in their respective depths onto the sensor(ie. reach). ... mirrorless far easier.
Fuji even easier than most other mirrolesses at that too .. no possible way to damage a sensor based stablization mechanics(that doesn't exist) .. so you'd be fine to do a wet clean.

as long as the pure nitrogen doesn't contain any 'harmful' propellants, and no chance of this propellant getting onto the sensor, sounds fine.

I'm going to assume that due to the question, you know little about dust on sensor issues with cameras?

So, to test for 'dust bunnies'(as they're affectionately known), lens type is inconsequential, but an easy test for you to do is take a single shot of any plain monotone area.
eg. of this are a wall, or a clear blue sky. if a wall, then don't let it focus too sharply, or keep it defocused. just capture a well exposed shot, maybe a little bit over like +0.5Ev over .. brighter is better, but not excessively so.

Set lens aperture to something like f/8 or smaller(ie. larger No.)
The smaller aperture just focuses the dust bunnies better .. and almost certain that you will have them.

Get this test shot onto a computer screen, and look at it at a minimum 50% pixel view .. just makes it easier to zoom about to see them all. at 100% pixel scaling you just see them easier.

These little tacker get 'baked on' .. the more shots you expose, the harder they get baked onto the sensor. At some point in the cameras life, if they aren't cleaned they build up and get harder to remove.
So it's kind of like a 'service' but not a critical one .. for the camera. Camera will work etc, just gets diretier and harder to clean.
In most shooting situations, where there are no large plain monotone areas in the image, as there would be a a typical landscape shot with the sky in it .. these dust bunnies go unnoticed.

Sensor cleaning with 'swabs' is very low risk if common sense is used. ie. don't be a butcher when doing it.
You don't need a clean room or anything like that. Zero to minimal air flow in the area when doing a sensor clean is handy.

I use what's known as the Copperhill cleaning method.
Copperhill just refers to a company that used to sell a kit for cleaning sensors using the wet clean method.
The items needed for this are:
Pecpads .. wipes made of a very soft lint free material. It's near impossible to scratch a surface with pecpads, but I'm sure some butcher somewhere in the world may have succeeded .. lol! I've tried.
There is a spatula looking paddle that is wrapped with the pecpad.
Then you place 2 or 3 drops of this Eclipse fluid onto the very tip of the pecpad and wipe the sensor surface, once with the paddle angled one way, flip the paddle to the other side of the tip is then going to do the second wipe.

Also to note, that you don't actually clean the sensor itself. There are filter packs on the sensor(need to be there), and the actual thing you clean is a clear UV filter.
So you won't do any damage to the sensor itself if you did do any damage .. and a big .. very questionable IF at that too ..

Long story:

with canned air, I was always worried that the propellant would one day just belch out and onto my sensors .. so I wanted to have the upper hand and of course tested it all out.
1. first test on a sacrificial (useless) UV filter. Shook canned air and blew out as much propellant as I could get it too .. which wasn't much. In a 5 sec spray, I reckon about 1sec of white propellant stuff ejected from the nozzle.
Less than a 1/4 of the filter got a small dose of very fine powdery looking propellant.
It basically wiped off the filter with just a pecpad, I couldn't detect any marks, residue or anything that would render the filter unusable.
2. so had to test on the poor old D70s. Tried the same butchery canned air application on the D70s, and actually had trouble getting the propellant out. But once it finally did spurt out, it was a smaller dose than on the UV filter.
Sensor is much smaller than a UV filter tho, and most of the sensor got the white goop on it. Cleaned off without any issue at all, using the wet clean swab method.

Note never use a dry swab across a sensor. The swab itself won't scratch the filter material, the dust could.
Never been successful in getting a dry pecpad to scratch a sacrificial filter or lens .. ever! .. and I've tried. But never game to try it on a sensor.

Thanks Arthur.

Yep, new to digi, all my other cameras are film!