Ed Okie wrote:Sony a7RIII sensor cleaning: a search on NatureScapes forum pages reveals no new commentary on the Sony-specific "Sensor Gel Stick" in the past year.
NatureScape's store doesn't carry the product.
Specific Sony cameras allegedly require different Gel Stick types....
It's now a month later and a solution at hand:
Sony a7R3 sensor cleaning – one year of ownership, after weeks of using the camera’s built-in sensor-shaker, and occasionally an external air-blower bulb – nothing worked. Dust spots remained, never moved.
Shaker is useless, blowing didn’t work - tried the opposite: held a vacuum cleaner nozzle at the side of the lens face-plate mount thinking the turbulence created might move or collect dust spots. Same story: didn’t work. Assumption: the spots are really bonded, I’m in trouble.
Options available: The Photolife Store for months has listed their “Sony special” $60 gel-stamp tool as “out of stock.” No response to the inquiry “when will it be in stock?”
Dust-Aid Platinum – the name, platinum, sends it into a questionable category – is it pure marketing hype? One of those alleged “magical” terms.
Digging deeper on Dow Chemical’s website, it’s simply a curing step used in the manufacture of silicone sheeting, to change liquid into semi-solid. Other forms of curing exist, but there is no platinum within a gel-stamp tool (today’s cost of platinum is approximately $815 per ounce).
Ebay and Amazon both list Dust-Air Platinum (and as is typical, $5 higher on Amazon). In both instances the product supplier is actually Outdoorphotogear.com, a highly reputable photo store in Louisville KY. $30 their cost, free shipping. I bought it direct.
Dust-Air Platinum’s external box says the silicone is made in the USA, plastic parts made in China. “Holding” flag and stick, along with plastic box seem very cheap. Silicone pad on the end arrives uncovered resting on a holder within the plastic box. Obviously not assembled in a sterile “clean room.”
Six sticky tape tabs are included, one-time use items. Before initial use the pad requires cleaning; neither the tape nor the pad itself seem sticky, pad definitely doesn’t have the feel of sticking to the camera sensor (nor the tape!) Not what I expected.
But does it work? To my astonishment: sensor is spotless, for the first time ever no white dust spots! Required three applications. Unnerving and a bit awkward to poke something into the camera, plus the sensor itself moves slightly as the pad touches. But there is no sticky-feel to the sensor itself. Straight up and down movement.
After next day’s shooting… three tiny dark fiber spots appeared on the sensor (possibly from the edge of the black silicone pad?). Pad-use cleaned off fiber spots.
Another shooting day and a large white dust spot appeared; where it came from I haven’t a clue. No lens changing involved other than during the prior cleaning stage.
Definitely buy the extra package of 12 tapes ($10), six come with the stick-pad, a minimum of two are used the very first time.
Worth a try, worked in my instance, but it is – not – for removing oil stains. Since the white dust spots had remained on the sensor for months, “bonded,” I was doubtful the (non-sticky) silicone pad would work. To my surprise it did!
One note worth passing along, something I forgot initially: When a dust spot(s) is viewed on a test exposure… the location is – inverted, but not L-R reversed. If the spot appears at say, 1 O’clock at the top-right in the test view… the physical spot is actually located at 5 O’clock bottom-right on the sensor. Right to Left remains the same, but the top of the viewing image is actually recorded on the bottom of the sensor - upside down. (The view we see on the backside LCD has electronically been corrected in orientation, the same as we see when viewing an image file during post-processing.)