Sensor Cleaning Mythbusting (Part 4)

So, I sold the D70s with the minor dust problem and got an all new Fuji S5pro. With a clean sensor, of course - how great is that? However... with the past year of digital photography, I grew more confident in exchanging lenses, swapping my 18-200VR superzoom with the 12-24 wideangle zoom more often, also utilizing the 50mm f/1.8 lens more often, etc.

Guess what - one sunny day I had a huge spot in my photos. It was a tiny hair, or something. I blew it away with my superduper rocket photo bellow, and it worked (I held the camera with the sensor pointing downward over a 150W lamp and blew in one streak of air with the below, and believe me, I saw that dust thing fall out of the mirror chamber). However... as I described before, the bellow blows in other, tinier dust particles... and one day, they start to show.

I already knew that wet cleaning isn't really much better than dry cleaning anyway, and I still found this "electrostatic charge" approach to be the right thing... it just had to be more professional than the "nylon brush & compressed air" attempts that already failed. So... I bought this wonderful device called "Arctic Butterfly". Its a nylon brush with a motor than will spin the brush real fast - you charge the brush that way, then turn off the motor and swipe the sensor with it. There's a video on YouTube showing someone cleaning a Nikon D3 sensor with it, it looks so simple! And there's an article at Luminous Landscape (a website that I value quite highly) which says that the Arctic Butterfly is good. I trusted them.

But guess what: IT AIN'T WORKING! I've swiped the damn sensor 5 times, following the instructions exactly, spinning the brush after each stroke, and after each attempt, there was still enough dust on my sensor that I could see. That motor driven brush is SUPER expensive (60€ for a plastic shit device, I'm sorry, but thats the truth) and its SUPER useless, too. I'm absolutely sure that the "charge something" stuff really doesn't work, no matter if its nylon brushes with compressed air or that wonder-gem called Arctic Butterfly.

Eat this: after using the Arctic Butterfly, I have dust particles on my sensor that I can see on the cameras tiny display when I use full magnification. I left it that way and reverted to dodge & burn in Lightroom. Screw sensor cleaning. You'll never get that thing perfectly clean once you've spotted the first dust particles.

Update: after writing this article, I kept trying the Arctic Butterfly because its the most convenient to carry around. My experience now is that you need just a LOT of swipes with the brush. Something like 20 works to remove fine dust particles that show up as small spots. So its like: spin the thing, make one swipe, then spin the thing, make the next swipe... and just do this very very often. For big particles, one single swipe might work.

To make myself clear: NONE of the cleaning techniques I've tried so far has worked. I've spent an ABSURD amount of money to remove things from my sensor that I cannot see with my own eyes, and it was NOT worth any penny of it. Its outrageous what a large amount of stupid things "they" want to sell you, and the amount of super-duper useless tips that float around the WWW is hilarious. And thats why I said that dust on the sensor is the single most annoying thing of digital SLR photography.

I guess I'm ready for disco film.