Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2010/03/02

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Subject: [Leica] Sensor cleaning revisited
From: photo at frozenlight.eu (Nathan Wajsman)
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2010 06:46:21 +0100
References: <36172e5a1003021807sc386aag5660bae386eaa8cb@mail.gmail.com>

Wow, this sounds scary Geoff. I bet several doses of "blood pressure 
medication" were needed during and after this process.

Because of tales like this, I have a simple rule: never put any liquid on 
the sensor, never touch it with anything wet. I use Sensor Scope. The kit 
does contain liquid and swabs but I have never used them; the little vacuum 
cleaner has until now been adequate on my M8 and before that on my Canon 
cameras. Of course, with Olympus I did not need any sensor cleaning thanks 
to the built-in dust removal system. I wish Leica had the same thing.

Cheers,
Nathan

Nathan Wajsman
Alicante, Spain
http://www.frozenlight.eu
http://www.greatpix.eu
http://www.nathanfoto.com

Books: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/search?search=wajsman&x=0&y=0
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On Mar 3, 2010, at 3:07 AM, Geoff Hopkinson wrote:

> I had a recent exchnge on and off list regarding cleaning the M9 sensor.
> When I just cleaned mine ( which has not had heavy use), I was dismayed to
> find that I had persistent streaks, some of which looked alarmingly like
> fine scratches.
> I was confident that I had been careful. I used the Arctic butterfly brush
> first to remove any loose dust and then did a careful wet pass with Visible
> Dust Plus. I only had 1.3x size swabs.
> The streaks remained after 3 separate cleaning cycles with new swabs each
> time.
> I repeated this all with the Dust Aid kit which uses swabs that you need to
> manually wind around the spatula and their fluid. Same result. My Leica
> dealer repeated this, same result.
> We could not budge the easily visible streaks although they were completely
> undetectable on test images at high magnification on a monitor.
> 
> Today I repeated the dry clean folowed by a wet clean with the Eclipse type
> 3 (size) swab and their fluid. They no longer consider the E2 fluid
> necessary for tin oxide sensors and recommend their standard fluid for 
> every
> sensor.
> A single pass in each direction completely removed every trace of the
> streaks and I am a happy camper. I believe that the streaks I had were
> either traces of oil, possibly from the swab touching the surrounds of the
> sensor (shutter lubricant??), drying marks from the fluids used (qty?) or a
> combination of both.
> 
> I note that the Eclipse fluid contains methanol.
> Visible Dust fluid does not and they state that methanol can damage the 
> seal
> of the covering bonded to the sensor.
> Leica recommends isopropyl alcohol.
> In any event I wanted to report my experiences. I'm sure that others will
> have had different experiences and views. Incidentally the Eclipse swabs
> actually cost even more here than the Visible Dust products so that should
> please those who considered I was skimping by trying the Dust aid swabs 
> when
> my Visible Dust ones (M8 size) ran out!
> 
> Cheers
> Geoff
> http://www.pbase.com/hoppyman
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Leica Users Group.
> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
> 



Replies: Reply from jhnichols at lighttube.net (Jim Nichols) ([Leica] Sensor cleaning revisited)
In reply to: Message from hopsternew at gmail.com (Geoff Hopkinson) ([Leica] Sensor cleaning revisited)