After the futile attempts of dry cleaning, I finally gave in to wet cleaning. I've read some clever blog posts that recommended very very very pure ethyl alcohol (or some other type, it seems like people can't make up their minds, one say ethyl, others say isopropyl alcohol is better) and cotton buds.
I went to the drugstore, and the first obstacle was the pure alcohol. They're not allowed to sell it in its very pure form. The best you can get here in Germany regularly is something like 90% - the rest is water, which leaves traces on the sensor when it evaporates, and thats not desirable. However, after explaining my problem, I got a very small amount (that will probably last for the next 50 years nevertheless) of 96% pure ethyl alcohol and proceeded with the sensor cleaning attempts.
The problem is the same as the one I already discovered with the nylon brushes: you can swipe the dust around, but you can NOT get it off the sensor. Wet cleaning with cleaning fluids may be good if you have some really nasty smear stain on the sensor, but it doesn't really work for removing simple dust. You'll end up with the dust on one side or corner of the sensor, and thats it.
At this point, I had enough. I filled in a form for Nikon's inspection service and sent the D70s off to Nikon's Munich service point for checking & cleaning - at the special price of about 50€ (plus shipping and stuff it ends up to be something like 70€) the sensor would be cleaned, but thats not all - the Nikon website lists a crazy amount of things they'd do, including AF adjustment, mirror and prism check, and whatnot. That sounded really good, so I gave away the camera for about 10 days.
When I got it back, I couldn't notice any difference regarding AF, mirror, prism, and whatnot. And the dust on the sensor? They, too, swiped it from one corner of the sensor to the other. So, that was another wasted 70€. I've reached the 100€ mark by now, and still no dust-free sensor. It wouldn't really show because the remaining dust was in one of the upper corners of the sensor, which means it appeared it was in the lower corners of the photo, and at normal apertures of f/8 to f/11, it wasn't really a problem.
Shortly after that, I got the Fuji S5pro, and with the confidence of the whole check & clean of the Nikon service point I sold the D70s as you may have read here in my blog. :-) But the sensor dust story doesn't end here, of course...
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