Digital Home Thoughts: Out Darned Spot, Out: Sensor Brush and Sensor Clean

Dirty. Dirty Dirty Dirty.
If you had any doubt about my sensor's need for a cleaning, the following picture should clean your doubt up right away:


Figure 1: That's one dirty sensor!

That's two years of dust and crud, folks. Two years. 8O It's time for a serious cleaning.

Dust Removal with Sensor Brush
According to the Visible Dust website the Sensor Brush is "engineered to be different". Super-thin fibres with a special chemical treatment are designed to "last a very long time", and the wooden handle should "protect against electrostatic discharge". When charged with a blast of air from a can the brush is supposed to wipe away all traces of dust.

I ordered the 8mm brush after reading somewhere that the smaller brush size is better at manoeuvring inside the camera body. Two quick passes should be all it takes to clean the sensor, with a blast of compressed air in between to clean off the bristles.

So how did it work? Here's my sensor after a pass with the brush. Note that this, and all future photos, was taken by shooting at my LCD monitor, unlike the first picture which was shot against some frosted plastic. Even though the image quality isn't quite as good you can still see the difference:


Figure 2: After cleaning with the Sensor Brush

It's definitely better. The vast majority of the dust is gone and all that remains are the smudges from water and whatnot.