q-tips | Patrick Wenz

SOLVED: The cleaning question.

So you bought a neat little camera body together with two or more interchangeable lenses you played around with it or used it on your assignments and you took really good care of it. BUT: No matter how carefull you are with your equipment the sensors of todays DSLRs is not sealed off from the rest of the world meaning that sooner or later there will but dust and other dirt meeting on it to throw a dirty little high f-stop party. The results can usually be seen above f/8 when shooting an evenly lit bright surface. Dark spots everywhere! Alert!.

The problem: Dirt on your DSLRs sensor.

At this point you usually have three options:

Send in your body for maintenance.
Buy an expensive cleaning product.
Get your hands on a perfectly working ultra cheap cleaning product.

While an inspection and a professional cleaning is good idea from time to time you do not want to do this too often. Sending the body to the manufacturer or a local service point usually has 3 or more days of “downtime”. Local non-official stores and dealers can be fast but cost the same from my experience. Another reason to send in your gear the manufacturer is that you are most likely give a certificate of maintenance which everybody loves especially if you plan on reselling you stuff sooner or later. The second option is what every company with a cleaning product and the general XYZ photography magazine advertisement wants you to do. Its the no-brainer solution but not in the positive sense. Holy crap is this stuff expensive. You can easily spend 80€ on some sensor swipe whatever pads and 20ml of stuff called “Eclipse”. That is a lot of money considering that the only thing you want to do ist getting rid of a little dust.

As a third option you can use your brain and think a little. The stuff called Eclipse is 100% pure methanol, the sensor swipes are some kind of soft tissue usually dipped in methanol. You can PERFECTLY clean you DSLRs sensor using Q-Tips and methanol. I tried a lot of stuff and this is by far the cheapest and best solution i have come across, as long as you make sure certain conditions are met:

Make sure you really use analysis grade clean laboratory Methanol.
Use some tips with 100% cotton.

When searching the net you come across a faction of people who do not think to high of this cleaning method. That usually is because the used the wrong alcohol. Isopropyl alcohol (Isopropanol) which most pharmacies want to sell you here in germany has the disadvantage to leave schlieren/streaks on you sensor because it seems to be more hygroscopic than methanol. Ethanol on the other hand which is the second offer pharmacies will make usually contains denaturants to keep you from consuming it but also leaves schlieren. I’m no chemist though, i write this drawing from my experience. Methanol evaporates perfectly fine without leaving streaks. The reason you read that you should use the original Q-Tips on most forums is that they are 100% cotton. You can use every other tips as long as it is not made of a synthetic micro fabric that will get attacked by the methanol or has some other smearing “feels good on your skin” additives.

The problem with Methanol though is that its poisonous. Here in germany most pharmacies don’t want to sell it because the can be held responsible if something goes wrong with it. It’s perfectly legal even though Methanol is listed in the Chemikalien-Verbotsverordnung (ChemVerbotsV), a list of dangerous and or poisonous chemicals. Last week i had some really bad experiences with the pharmacies here in Karlsruhe. They tend to treat you like a terrorist and complete idiot when asking for Methanol, it’s a shame. You’d imagine that you are treated as a mature and responsible citizen but that is not the case. Five pharmacies later and i gave up. Luckily a friend who happens to be a chemical laboratory worker got me a small bottle. He also confirmed that it’s not dangerous at all as long as you do not drink it, use it to poison someone else and make sure that there is a basic ventilation like a window which perfectly suffices.

My advice: Save your money, get your hands on some Methanol and some cotton tips. You’ll be surprised how perfectly this works. It also removes heavier contamination. I once sneezed on my sensor, Methanol saved my day! Cost for the complete cleaning system: Depending on where you buy it 4€ tops!