After two unsuccessful tries to rid my K-3 sensor of dust and other stuff that didn't belong there, I was already on the brink of sending in the camera to Rüdiger Maerz GmbH, Ricoh Imaging's German service partner. Then yesterday, finally, I experienced the unspeakable relief of looking at a dust alert image without the tiniest spot or mark - squeaky clean again! Many on this forum will perform such cleanings on a regular basis, so I guess it's not a big deal, but those three attempts were my first ever go at sensor cleaning, and I'm glad that I seem to have got the knack of it. Not only that, I also want to share the cleaning solution that did it for me.
It all started with a single dust speck that had turned out to be the cause of cloud deformations and weird bokeh on the right border of the frame in some of my recent shots. At first I shied away from wet cleaning, so I decided to give the Pentax Image Cleaning Kit a try. Sadly, though possibly due to my lack of experience, the adhesive stamp did away with the original culprit but left me with more dust on the sensor than ever before, regardless of how carefully I tried to stamp off any dust I had picked up on the cleaning sheats after each application of the stamp to the sensor. I guess I could have used up the whole pad of cleaning sheets and still wouldn't have changed anything. From overexcessive stamping-off, I even seemed to end up with little bits of the sticky gel material on the sensor. A clear case of
Verschlimmbessern, that unique German expression meaning 'the act (and outcome) of making a problem markedly worse by trying to solve it'.
So I turned to VisibleDust's VDust Plus wet cleaner and their Orange Series sensor swabs. Market leader stuff should certainly do it, I assumed. Quite costly, so I opted on a budget kit with five swabs, sensor brush, and a minuscule bottle of the wet cleaner. Said mini bottle made it virtually impossible to apply the liquid sparingly on the swabs, however, and having gone through all five swabs I ended up with some nasty streaks or smears on the sensor. Again, partly due to my own incompetence, but otherwise thank you, VisibleDust!
At amazon.de, I had become aware of a Chinese manufacturer of cleaning solutions, VSGO. Those guys based in Shanghai turned out to have a rather trust-inspiring website, including claims of cutting-edge cleanroom production and packaging of their products. In my growing desperation, and also because they seemed to be willing to fill their kits with more product, a whole 15ml bottle of cleaner along with 12 vacuum-packed swabs, without asking a small fortune for it, I decided on a last-ditch attempt. Before I did, I had mailed them to check whether their DDS-3 cleaner was safe for AA filter-less sensors as in the K-3, to which they promptly replied in the affirmative. Well, their APS-C DSLR Sensor Cleaning Kit DDR-16 arrived perfectly packaged, as if it contained some vital medicine (which in a way it did), and I found it to be of the choicest quality. English and German instructions included. The sensor cleaner came in a bottle that allowed measuring out single drops. I started out with two drops a swab, got fresh streaks, then reduced to one drop and went after with a dry swab, which finally did it.
I'm not at all surprised that VSGO claims to be Nikon's OEM supplier for camera cleaning kits. I, for one, have found my go-to solution for wet sensor cleaning, that much is clear.
Last edited by Madaboutpix; 09-12-2015 at 07:55 AM.
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