80 — Clean your camera’s sensor — cleaning camera lenses

Comments

1. Fortytwo says:
   April 9, 2010 at 11:33 am

   Tnx for the pod­cast Marko. Again you’ve man­aged to put together a very com­pri­hen­sive pod­cast. Nice work!

   I’m used to clean­ing my gear myself. But I’m a lucky guy, I’ve got my own lab­o­ra­tory includ­ing some fancy stuff as a clean air hood, fil­tered pres­surised air, vac­u­um­lines, lint free wipes a plenty, latex sur­gi­cal gloves and clean, fil­tered alco­hol. I just want to com­ment that even though you should be really care­full with your sen­sor, it’s not made of sugar. Basi­cally, you’re clean­ing a piece of plas­tic. It doesn’t dam­age that eas­ily. Thank God! So, have a go at the wet stuff, it isn’t that hard to do.

   Grtz,
   42

   Reply
2. MrTim says:
   April 6, 2010 at 6:16 pm

   Hi Marco,

   I’m also a fan of the lenspens, at least for clean­ing lenses. I’ve mostly just used the blower on my sen­sor, although I have the cop­per hill kit and used it once to remove a really stub­born blob. I may pick up a Sen­sorKlear, as the cop­per hill process made me a lit­tle ner­vous — the first time I tried it I got a big smear that was worse than the blob, so I had to do it again. Then it was fine, but my blood pres­sure shot up for a while there!

   For the lenspen and the sen­sorklear: do you ever worry about it get­ting dirty, and then scratch­ing your lens/sensor? That has been my only con­cern with them. I could envi­sion pick­ing up a bit of cruft and then push­ing it around over the opti­cal sur­face (shud­der). I always blow before try­ing any of these other tech­niques, but I’d be inter­ested to hear your thoughts.

   - Tim

   Reply
   • admin says:
     April 7, 2010 at 12:35 pm

     Thanks for the com­ments again everyone!

     Mr. Tim — I think I men­tioned in the pod­cast that after each pass from left to right with the sen­sorKlear, I take the sen­soK­lear out of the cam­era cham­ber and use my blower (NEVER my fin­gers) to blow off any stray dust off the sen­sorKlear. Then I’ll go back into the cham­ber for another pass.

     Hope that makes sense,

     Thx!
     Marko

     Reply
3. Jason says:
   April 3, 2010 at 11:28 am

   Marco, just lis­tened to the pod­cast this morn­ing. It was full of won­der­ful, com­mon sense tips, that are so easy to neglect. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve swapped lenses out and neglected to put the sec­ond lens cap on.

   Reply
4. WickedDark says:
   March 31, 2010 at 7:33 pm

   After 5+ years with Olym­pus and that famous dust removal mech­a­nism, I have never had the need to clean my sen­sor. Good to know that this pod­cast is here though…maybe dur­ing the next five years I’ll need it. : P

   Reply
5. admin says:
   March 31, 2010 at 8:02 am

   My plea­sure guys! Thx for the comments!

   Sean — I agree that the 40 bucks is well spent and I myself paid 40ish dol­lars a cou­ple of times dur­ing the life of my last DSLR to have its sen­sor cleaned by a pro.
   …now I feel totally com­fort­able to do it myself but until you do, don’t stress out just let a pro shop/dealer clean it.

   Reply
6. Sean G says:
   March 31, 2010 at 1:41 am

   Great pod­cast, as always.

   I recently took my cam­era in for a sen­sor clean­ing, and it was well worth the $40. A local shop was rec­om­mended, and they did a great job and cleaned my filthy sen­sor and I was able to pick it up the next day! It’s great to be able to shoot at higher f/stops again with­out all those spots.

   Those lens pens sound like a good deal, I’ll have to pick one up.

   Thanks again for the great resource you pro­vide us.

   Reply
7. Richard says:
   March 30, 2010 at 10:38 pm

   Thanks for another great pod­cast, I’ve put in an order this morn­ing for an ‘air blower’, I’ve not got a dust prob­lem yet but I want to be pre­pared for the future, and your pod­cast has inspired me to take some basic pre­cau­tions, like keep­ing the lens back free from dust.

   Keep up the good work!

   Reply

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