Although the following disaster happened to a Nikon, it applies equally to Canons.
I recently purchased an "Arctic Butterfly" sensor cleaning brush from VisibleDust. The Arctic Butterfly is the self-contained brush solution that includes an electric motor for rotating the brush, causing its bristles to become charged before use.
The brush portion of the assembly arrived in the mail unprotected from dust and freely floating around a black nylon mesh carrying bag. After connecting the brush to the device, I carefully following the accompanying instructions in an effort to clean the sensor of my close-to-new Nikon D2X. At the time, my D2X had only a couple of visible dust specs at f/22. During the cleaning the brush touched nothing but the surface of the sensor.
The brand new Arctic Butterfly actually added about three times this amount of dust to the sensor. Worse yet, it also added an oily residue that appeared as dark smudges in all pictures, irrespective of the f stop used, rendering my D2X unuseable. I had to spend nearly an entire day learning about wet cleaning and acquiring the materials necessary to successfully correct the problem.
Even more disturbingly, the VisibleDust company has refused for four days to respond to any of my questions about this problem and have wholly failed to stand behind thier product. I don't know if this is a typical experience with them, but you may want to take it into account when shopping for a sensor cleaning solution.
MOD EDIT: Moved from Canon-mount forum to this forum because it's really a "general" gear issue, not specifically related to either Nikon or Canon.
Edited by Scott Sewell on Oct 25, 2005 at 02:41 PM GMT
sapro wrote:
I just followed instruction in this artical, spent $5 on a brush, and $8 on two cans of compressed air, and it's never failed on me
I did the same, except used an air mattress foot pump instead of the canned air. Works very well, just be sure to clean the brush and check it on a coated filter.
Thanks to all of you for the suggestions. After not responding to my emails for five days, a representative of VisibleDust just replied. The reply, however, ignored my request for a refund and instead suggested that I purchase further products from them to help fix the problem that their "Arctic Butterfly" caused and to clean their product (which should have been clean when they sent it to me new) so that the problems will not recur. Suffice it to say, that is not going to happen.
Yeah based on the Petteri's Site I went to the 2 days ago mall and bought a 14 dollar nylon makeup brush for eyeliner. I performed the 100 stroke test with the brush on a clean UV filter to makesure it would not leave any residue - I was perfectly clean. Finally I use an air pump to blow the bristles in order to remove any acquired dust particles as well as to give the nylon a charge. (trust me, it works - nylon will easily aquire a charge; you can test it with some dust off a black surface and see the particles "fly" up to the brush.) I fisrt cleaned the chamber, mirror, and focus screen, then I locked up the mirror, and did 4 strokes with the nylon brush. I used the air pump on the brush in between each stroke.
And I'm glad to say that my sensor is perfectly clean now.
P.S. I actually did this on both my cameras - the 300D and the 20D
