"Sensor Cleaning the Eclipse way"

[William]

After and before shots , Must admit it needed cleaning , both shots at 24mm f22

[Boofhead]

Needed a clean? Slightly :lol: :lol: good result that mate :th3: :beer_mug:

[William]

:th3: Took a few :beer_mug:To get the courage Andrew :D Still a dodgy thing , Only the second time I've done it , Took a couple of shots after and all seems OK , Now I can put that spot healing and clone tool away for a while :lol:BTW on the 120-400 Position 1 for general shooting and 2 for panning ;)- Cheers mate

[ricktas]

Well done, it is not as hard as people expect it to be. Once you have done it, its quite easy to repeat and keep your sensor clear

[William]

Thanks Rick, I was only joking a little , So long as you have the right sized swabs , I did have a couple of settling beers , Took it in the bathroom ,The most dust free room I could think of , 5 to 6 drops of fluid on the swab, Be positive and do a clean move across the filter ( note not the sensor) dont hesitate one nice movement with enough pressure to lust bend the swab shaft , Take another shot at the sky @f22 , Load into the computor and check the results , If needed do again , Took three times to get it this clean , I did as the instructions said , swipe across , Then reverse the swab then discard , Took 3 swabs for this one - Bill :th3:

[old dog]

good one Bill. I have a great big unmovable blob on my D7000 and will be hammering the clone stamp tool when I get back from Tassie...off tomorrow yipee. Then I will man up and get the swab kit..:eek:

[William]

No probs Graeme, As Rick said , It is easy , I cant vouch for any other method , But the Eclipse fluid and swabs work for me ;)

PS : Make sure you have a full battery and go to camera menu asnd set "Sensor clean"

[Derek-C]

You been playing down at the Rock again Bill ?

Derek

[arthurking83]

Good stuff William, and it goes to show that even when you're full of :beer_mug: and intoxicated to high heaven, you can still achieve this easy to do process!
(have no idea on why people are so cautious to to it themselves, it's so easy!!)

But one point I wanted to bring to people's attention, is what's happened to William here.
It looks as though it's been a long time between drinks here for William, and there must have been a lot of dust on the sensor.
If this happens, the dust becomes quite attached to the surface of the sensor's filter(note as William said, it's the filter you are cleaning, and not the sensor itself).
Sometimes as the dust has become baked on(due to the static charge of the sensor), as you swipe the sensor, you are dragging the dust across the surface.
Sounds like a recipe for sensor damage, but in fact it's not(well as least not in the years that I've done it), but this is important to note for a better job with respect to two particular steps.
- if you need to do multiple swipes, it's always best to swipe in the same direction as the previous swipes(for that particular job.. not for every job!)

That is, you swipe with the sensor swab once, flip it and do it again in the same direction. This way you're not dragging any remainig dust spots across from one side, to anotherm and then back again.

Usually, the Copperhill kit comes with a sensor swab that is only just smaller than the actual sensor size, so you have to swipe one half first, and then do another clean sweep for the other half of the sensor(using the other side of the sensor swab).

Always use the sensor swab only once per swipe. Don't be tempted to 'cheap out' on PecPads. You swipe once in one direction, and then again flip the swab over so that the PecPad is now using the other side of the tapered edge, and swip again in the same direction as the previous swipe.

Folks have commented that 'dragging the dust' across the filter pack's surface is causing damage, but in the 5 years that I've been doing it on my two cameras, I've never seen any adverse effects from this issue, but more importantly is that because the PecPad is wet with a cleaning solution, the dust is not doing any damage.
If it were a dry swipe, then yes, I could imagine there'd be some kind of etching effect, but the wet nature of the workflow doesnt' appear to cause any ill effect.
My D300 has had some few hundred swipes with the copperhill kit, but note that this also includes a blow out with canned air before I do the wet clean.
I occasionally use a PecPad for cleaning the odd filter or an external part of the camera, but on the whole, 99% of their use is basically reserved for cleaning the sensor.
For the first year or so, I used the copperhill kit on the D70s and never really counted how many cleans I'd done on it but since I've had the D300, I've now gone through 4 packs of PecPads @ 100 wipes per pac.
That would be well over 200 cleans at least for the D300.. maybe close to 300, and in all my years of pixelpeeping this camera's files, I can't see any ill effects on it.

.. I just wished ISO6400 wasn't so grainy tho! :p

Note also: there is some residual dust speckling on the lower right of William's clean image, but as this is shot at f/22, there is a very high probability that the specks wont' show up in any images(unless you specifically look for them, or if the area is a solid pale colour).

But I keep cleaning them till they're gone, and this is why it's important to keep in mind the direction of the sweep on the sensor.
It's only important to me to keep clean, because I know how hard they can bake themselves onto the filter pack's surface, which only makes it harder to clean the next time around.
Having it clean as a whistle simply for the purpose of having totally spot free digital images is close to being the most futile effort imaginable. There will always be dust on some of your images.

[William]

Quote Arthur : It looks as though it's been a long time between drinks here for William, and there must have been a lot of dust on the sensor !!

Your right Arthur, At least 3 yrs :( Sadly I think some have really baked on, I would have tried to get them all off, But I ran out of Swabs :)

[Kym]

Either dust or birds in the distance :D

[William]

:lol: Wish it was birds Kym, But all's good I went out this morning , Took about 60 shots , "No Bunnies" @f9 at all , Best thing is I still have image quality :th3:

[Paul G]

Did you buy the kit online somewhere William or at a local shop?

[William]

Hi Paul, Sort of got the kit on line from here http://www.camerasdirect.com.au/accessories-1?cat=30531&producttype=506 , Thing is these guys are on the Coast at Labrador , They now have a shop front as well so you can go and pick up what ever you want from them in person, There delivery service is excellent tho , I guess some of the site sponsers would stock this item as well , But for me I can just pop up and get the stuff personally in 20 mins :)

[KeeFy]

I've used the cheap ebay ones with success :) $10 for 6 swabs delivered.

Anyway sensors have a coverglass. If you screw it up badly (which is quite hard to do), all you need to do is replace the coverglass. People replace or totally remove the glass to do IR photography all the time :)

[reaction]

I've never used eclipse but I want to talk about my experience with visibledust as a warning to others
they leave terrible streaks, and don't work. also their swabs are 1.6x sized. and sometimes leave particles.

each time I used the visibledust stuff I've spent ~5hrs and many swabs to get the sensor clean. now I just use a blower and leave everything else be...

[arthurking83]

.....

Anyway sensors have a coverglass. If you screw it up badly (which is quite hard to do), all you need to do is replace the coverglass. ......

Yep! as previously mentioned, it's a filter, or more accurately a filter pack, as there are multiple filters.

Even though you are correct in that if you screw it up you can replace the filters, from my understanding, these filters(genuine) are not always cheap.

The IR/UV nuts out there will be smart and hold on to their (good condition) filters just in case they have a change of heart, and want to restore the camera back to normal.

[KeeFy]

Yep! as previously mentioned, it's a filter, or more accurately a filter pack, as there are multiple filters.

Even though you are correct in that if you screw it up you can replace the filters, from my understanding, these filters(genuine) are not always cheap.

The IR/UV nuts out there will be smart and hold on to their (good condition) filters just in case they have a change of heart, and want to restore the camera back to normal.

The filter is quite thin and breaks easily. Most of the time for someone who's DIYing it there is more than a 50% chance to break it from what i understand. I did forget to mention that it's not that cheap to replace. Looking at minimum $300 to get someone to replace it for parts and labour dependent on model and who's changing it for you. Obviously Canon Aussie = inflated price.