These are an excellent way of blasting grit around the mirror box right onto those oily bits and represent an effective way of making matters much worse. What’s that? You think your precious Leica does not leak oil? Have you checked the road outside your house recently? Every machine which uses oil leaks it.įorget blower brushes. And releases of oil from the camera’s internal mechanisms onto the sensor will only be spread with the ultrasonic treatment. Stop the lens down, take a snap and sooner or later you will see blobs in large expanses of continuous tone – skies are especially sensitive to this. For a more technical reading check here for confirmation of the general uselessness of in-camera sensor cleaning systems. Neither of those bodies has a sensor cleaner. While my Nikon D700 had a ‘sensor cleaner’ built in – an ineffectual mechanism which applies ultrasonic waves to the cover glass over the sensor, a process which could not wipe dried snot off a sheet of ice – it really was not much better than the sensors in the D3x and D2x when it comes to keeping them dust free. Determining whether to clean your sensor manually is a function of how many pictures you publish and of what your time is worth.Īt Crissy field, San Francisco. You can retouch dust blobs in your images in your favorite photo-processing application, once per image, or you can clean the sensor once and do a minimum of retouching until it is time for another cleaning. Why bother cleaning your sensor? If you produce more than one picture in a blue moon your choice is simple.