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The image above is the result of using $14.95 of sensor swabs (3) on my admittedly very dirty sensor. Damn this is irritating.
OK, so despite some negative reviews of the sensorbrush system - spinning the brush to induce a static charge that will attract the dust, here's the same spot on the sensor after a good brushing.
There are still a dozen or so spots on the sensor, but that compares to probably thousands in the swabbed image. I had truly thought that the grime on the sensor would only respond to swabs but it appears I was wrong - I can comfortably live with a dozen spots, probably only one or two which will even show in the average image.
Points:
I exposed some sky to a manual metering of f32 and the exposure on the mark. I didn't do anything in camera raw and used auto levels in Photoshop to increase contrast dramatically for both images.
Some people find the sensor brush frustrating because it picks up oil from the mirror box and that gets transferred to the mirror. I have to tell you this sensor brush was sitting in a broken plastic box in which the lid was no longer attached, at the bottom of my accessory slot on my camera backpack, for the last six months of fairly regular shooting - I could actually see some black marks on the brush but hoped the marks were too far from the end of the bristles to affect the cleaning process - hardly ideal care - but it worked. Perhaps it's just luck, or more likely bad luck for those who do get oil on the brush. I certainly never use this brush to clean the mirror box or the mirror or even the ground glass below the pentaprism.
Take it for what it's worth. Here's hoping the new self cleaning sensors work as well as advertised (already there are mixed reviews).
1 comment:
Hmm ... what I can tell is my experience with the Nikon D300, and that's absolutely positive. I have the D300 since it came out in late November 2007, and before I had the D200 for 17 months.
I had to clean the D200 several times. In the beginning only sensor swabs would work, but when the sensor had lost all oil and was not sticky any more, nothing more than my Rocket Blower was needed.
In the almost five months that I have the D300, I had to use the Rocket Blower once, There was a mighty mote that the vibration could not remove, but in all other cases the built in sensor cleaning process worked just fine.
I clean the sensor consequently after each lens change. That's it. Quite simple.
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