Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2010/03/02
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]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 PICTURE OF THE WEEK: http://www.fotocycle.dk/paws Blog: http://www.fotocycle.dk/blog 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 >