Tuesday, April 7, 2009

I Cleaned the Sensor on my Canon Digital Rebel Camera

Wow... it's been a while. I actually started this post back on April 7. Things have gotten a little crazy since then. In the midst of all the commotion, Sophie turned 6, Will met the Easter Bunny, I donated a small piece of my back for surgical education, and our neighborhood has become the home to a rather tame Turkey (gobble gobble). All noteworthy, but honestly....I feel like YESTERDAY was April 7. It's now a week and a day later.

Back on April 7, I took the plunge with my digital SLR and decided to try and clean the sensor myself. After reading several articles on the best ways how to (and how not to) do it," I figured I might as well give it a try since, with the rate I switch out lenses, and with the amount of dust I seem to collect on the sensor, I couldn't afford to keep taking it in to be cleaned at $50 a pop. And, even though every article and post I read warned "...don't blame us if you destroy your camera doing this..." many of them also said, "there's nothing to it..." so I figured it's worth the risk. To make a long boring story short and ultimately sweet, the cleaning went fine, but I found I had to do it 3 times, each time holding my heart in my throat as I dragged my modified pec-pad-coverd spatula across the sensor, a little harder each time... until finally... no dust.

There is a great article on the whole process here [Cleaning the CMOS Sensor on your Digital Camera]. If you decide to proceed, read this article carefully, and read all the comments. There are some really good tips. My camera is a Canon EOS Digital Rebel (350D). I used a silicone spatula trimmed to 14mm, covered with a pec-pad moistend with Eclipse solution. The article linked above has all the info and resources on where to get this stuff, but I bought from Adorama.

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