jtra
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Contributing Member
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Posts: 939
First time sensor cleaning experience (Sony A7III)
7 months ago
4
I have never cleaned sensor on my Nikon cameras before, they did not got dirty that much to bother. I let the Nikon service to clean them few times over years and they did great job.
But my A7III was getting quite a bit of dirt on sensor even after month and half of owning so I decided I will be doing this often so I better learn it myself.
I have Eyelead Air Blower, but that one was not sufficient to clean it so I wanted to get some wet cleaning. Only one available in a local shop was Green Clean SC-4060 so I bought that. It has one wet foam swab (smaller than short sensor side) and one dry sweeper (width matching a short side of sensor). I did not want a gel stick based on reports of being it unsuitable for Sony sensors.
Here is how sensor looked before cleaning taking picture at f/22 to show all dirt (that does not get seen at wider apertures), manual focus, ISO 100, long exposure with movement to blur white tiles on the wall:
initial (no contrast adjustments)
All the remaining pictures are with following contrast adjustments in LR:

Here is the picture from same RAW as above, but with contrast adjustments applied:
initial (high contrast)
So this is initial state. Then I was vigorously blowing some air from close distance to clean it. Result of this blowing was this (still quite dirty, disregard the big ridge on the left - that is just wall detail not fully blurred by movement):
after blowing (high contrast)
I have put camera into cleaning mode to have non-moving sensor and did wet cleaning with first wet foam swab and dry sweeper. I did it in same way as shown in product demo videos. It cleaned, but not fully:
after first wet & dry cleaning (high contrast)
I did second pass with another pair (they are not supposed to be reused):
after second wet & dry cleaning (high contrast)
This is good enough and it will not be visible in low contrast pictures at all.
The original state was not overly bad, but when I was shooting distant low contrast landscape with 24-105 at 105mm f/8 and f/5.6 I needed to increase contrast in post-processing and then dirt was quite visible.