My mirror is a dust magnet

robbins.photo · Nov 18, 2013

hamlet said:
This cleaning business is getting costly. I should have just bought a new dslr.

Will a good cleaning cost you around $100? Probably. Will cleaning it yourself most likely result in you having to spend 4 to 5 times that much on another camera? Probably. But I did what I could. Good luck.

hamlet · Nov 18, 2013

That's a lot of money to clean a d3200.

robbins.photo · Nov 18, 2013

hamlet said:
That's a lot of money to clean a d3200.

A lot less than buying a replacement. But hey, your camera, your money. You can take my advice or ignore me completely, I think you'll be a lot happier and get much better results spending the money to have it cleaned. Then you'll pretty much have a new camera and probably won't have to worry about it for at least a couple of years. Or you can ignore me, try to clean it yourself - keeping in mind you've already tried that and gone from having some dust supposedly on the mirror to actually getting dust on the sensor in the process, so I would think at this stage you yourself would be extremely leery of trying to do this on your own again considering the results you got the first time out, going from bad to worse.

But it's entirely up to you, it's not something I'm going to debate. I gave you my best advice, not a thing in the world I can do should you decide to ignore me, as you pretty much have always done in the past. So again, I'll just wish you luck.

hamlet · Nov 18, 2013

All i tried was the rocket air thing.

kundalini · Nov 18, 2013

Blow it and forget it.

That's what she did.

Post processing also works wonders.

hamlet · Nov 18, 2013

Men much wiser than myself have suggested that.

hamlet · Nov 18, 2013

There is much more dust on the sensor than i thought.

robbins.photo · Nov 19, 2013

Well, you can try the camera's internal cleaning function - set the camera on a solid surface, base down, in the setup menu go to clean now and select ok. Only do this once, don't try to repeat over and over again - and see if that helps. Odds are good, it's going to need a professional cleaning. But hey, I'm just an alarmist after all. No need to listen to me..

hamlet · Nov 19, 2013

I've tried all the careful stuff. I will have to wait until my cleaning kit arrives in the mail. If i'm going to learn to do it myself, then it might as well be on my entry level dslr.

robbins.photo · Nov 19, 2013

hamlet said:
I've tried all the careful stuff. I will have to wait until my cleaning kit arrives in the mail. If i'm going to learn to do it myself, then it might as well be on my entry level dslr.

Well, good luck with that I guess.

hamlet · Nov 19, 2013

All that stuff was already on my sensor, that big black one was just newly added two days ago. I didn't shoot the test shot properly.

First i will go with the dry method of a fine paint brush. If that doesn't work, then i will try the adition of the wet method by use of swabs.

hamlet · Nov 19, 2013

I've calculated the cleaning costs if i have to only use two swabs. The cost runs up to $15 per cleaning, this is very economical.

C4n0n.Fan · Nov 19, 2013

Exhale and breath the OCD tendencies away.

SCraig · Nov 19, 2013

hamlet said:
There is much more dust on the sensor than i thought.

Sigh ..... there is ALWAYS dust on the sensor or the mirror or the focusing screen or somewhere. Always. The only question is how much and is it visible in the final image. I've cleaned mine one day and seen visible dust the next. In fact there have been times that I've cleaned my sensor and managed to get more dust on it while cleaning it than it had in the first place. It's a fact of life with DSLR's so get used to it and stop obsessing about it. They are not completely sealed. Each time you zoom a lens or remove a lens dust gets into the camera.

Cleaning a sensor assembly is easy but if you continue to obsess about it and try and keep every single speck of dust out then you are going to spend more time and money on cleaning than you did when you bought the camera, plus you are going to lose that battle since there is no way to prevent dust from getting in one. I absolutely GUARANTEE that I could check any one of my cameras right this minute and find dust on the sensor. So what? It usually doesn't show up in the final images, and if it does I just clone it out.