[BigMackCam]

You haven't been paying attention then.

That's entirely possible I didn't see any hysteria or fear-mongering in this thread, is what I should have said

[ffking]

Try one step at a time, testing after each one.

just one thing I'd add - the K-3 (menu- spanner-4 ) has 'dust alert' function, which is a good way of checking.

[Kerrowdown]

Are there a lot of camera service centres in the highlands of Scotland?

No certainly not, but there again you only need one.

[Shakey]

It's been a long time since I made this post so I thought I would follow up for those that might be interested.
Believe it or not I just got around to dealing with this early this morning! Camera had been working fine so I let it alone until I could focus (no pun intended) on the job at hand.
I bought the items that were recommended by you immediately after returning from my trip back in June...just opened them last night.

So this morning I set out to remove the focus screen....read a post from this forum. It was very easy to do. Once I had it off I could see that the bristle was stuck to the prism mirror..I used my new jet blower, held the camera upside down and blew off the mirror. I then blew out the rest of the camera.
Looked thru the view finder and the problem was gone.

I reassembled and then ran the sensor dust check...nothing..clean as a whistle! I have been running the sensor cleaning action on shut down and will continue to do so.
So now I have some cleaning supplies that I can save for another day . Camera works great and all is good. I also learned some things in the process.
Thank you all and Happy New Year!

[Wheatfield]

Had camera K-3 for a couple years and never used dust removal. Was not a problem until I noticed a spot on photos last night. Followed procedures but just have dust moving from one area to the other on the sensor. How do you get it out of there?

Shoot it with canned gas (seriously, the stuff isn't going to hurt your camera), and if that doesn't do it, then wet clean the sensor.

I've used canned gas routinely for the better part of 5 decades to clean camera innards, including DSLR innards since the *istD was released. I really don't understand the hysteria surrounding the use of a product designed to remove dust for the purpose for what it was designed to do. Just make sure you don't invert the can, as that wastes the stuff.

From the comments I've read about canned gas, one would think that as soon as you press the trigger it is going to shoot out liquid nitrogen or something similar and turn your camera into a blob of frozen blech that will shatter as soon as you touch it, and this is simply not the case.

I would have more fear about waving a thick plastic rocket blower around inside my camera and having it whack something when I gave the bulb a squeeze, not to mention the possibility of it having some sort of junk drawn into it and having that blown onto the sensor than I would about properly using a product designed for dust removal.

I did a survey on this forum a number of years ago to try to find one person who had actually damaged a camera with canned gas. For all the knee jerk fear surrounding the product, I was unable to find a single instance of someone who had managed to cause any sort of harm. I recall someone concocted a story about a guy who knew a guy, but that was a close as I got, and I write that sort of thing off as scare mongering, since third hand stories are most often inventions anyway.

I note I said exactly the same thing earlier. So it goes, nothing has changed. The fear mongering still goes on.

[niceshot]

They will come out and let you have it over this, watch