Battling Sensor Dust
If you spend enough time shooting with a digital SLR you will eventually encounter a problem with sensor dust. Sometimes this dust is the result of lens changes, and at other times – especially with a new camera – it stems from coatings and materials inside the camera and lenses themselves shedding onto the sensor. There are a number of products on the market now for cleaning your sensor, but prevention is still the best way to avoid dust problems. I covered both of these topics here. However, many cameras now include built-in sensor-cleaning mechanisms. But do these really do any good?
Testing automatic sensor cleaning mechanisms is a tricky process, because you have to have a way of intentionally getting your sensor dirty, and you need to have a way of getting different sensors equally dirty. Personally, I’ve never had the guts to try this with any of the eval cameras that I’ve had for review.
Fortunately, the guys at pixinfo.com are far gutsier than I, and so contrived a very interesting test of the dust cleaning mechanisms of the Olympus E-300, the Sony Alpha A100, the Pentax K10D, and the Canon Digital Rebel XTi (EOS-400D). The results are very surprising and you can check them out here.
To sum up: automatic sensor cleaning doesn’t work, which means you’re still going to need a manual cleaning method of some kind. Check out this video for what appears to be very effective, and very stomach-churning method, that I’m very glad someone tried, and am even more glad that it wasn’t me.
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