I had the stressful experience last night of having to clean the CMOS sensor of a Canon 20D. Laurie is off already going to take pictures of Sea Lions (hopefully). Of course, it's raining pretty good now. The timing didn't work out so well.

But anyway... I enjoy cleaning the camera lenses and stuff. It gives an interesting sense of accomplishment when I finish and a lens starts drying and the top glass element practically vanishes from view. But cleaning all of the lenses didn't fix all of the problems.

So, I had to put both cameras (Digital Rebel and 20D) into CMOS cleaning mode. That's where the camera lifts up the mirror so you can see directly into the sensor. Well, luckily there is actually a glass (or something) filter right above the sensor so you're not directly looking at raw electronics.

In any case, you're supposed to clean it by using a rubber balloon blower to burst air in and move the dust around such that it's not on the sensor. This worked perfectly fine on the Digital Rebel to get rid of a single visible bit of dust. Unfortunately, this didn't work on the 20D. A very large and very stubborn piece of dust had gotten stuck to one part of the sensor and another area of the sensor looked all smudged (a bit strange since nothing ever touches it). All of this had been noticed on the last photo shoot and it was a bit disappointing, but not critical (nothing a small dose of photoshop pills wouldn't solve).

However, as Laurie pointed out to me, lots of photographers had reported that sending the camera in to get cleaned costs a bunch `($50 plus shipping, packing, insurance, etc.) and often they still come back with some bits of dust. No clean room job found here. So, I found that some other people had actually decided to clean the sensor (well, the filter) directly.

One scratched and you're totally screwed and the repair is supposedly as expensive as a new camera. On top of that, the Canon manuals say that even a soft brush can easily scratch the surface.

Well, that didn't stop me. I put lens cleaning tissue around an equipment-cleaning-ready cotton swap (bits and pieces don't fall off), got it a little moist, and dabbed it on the dust bit. That easily went away. Then I moved on to a light rubbing of the entire surface. In a test picture at the end, all of the main bits had been removed. And nothing new was added. Lucky? Yeah. Would I do it again? Definitely.

However, we've changed the policy about moving lenses around. It's now move the lenses around as little as possible. Swap cameras if needed. Of course, this means having two of the same kind of camera balances out what each lens can do. Will we dump the Rebel and get a second 20D to solve that problem? We'll see...

CMOS sensor cleaning on the EOS 10D (and 300D?)

Posted by Shane on January 26, 2005 7:54 AM | Permalink