Over time every DSLR will collect dust on its CMOS or CCD sensor; there really isn't anyway around it. Cleaning your own camera's sensor with liquid wipes or other wet processes has always been a bit risky. Luckily the Sensor Gel Stick is a safe and easy product that top manufacturers like Leica, Nikon, and Canon have been using in their own factories for years. Now YOU can use it too!
Our good friend Nasim Mansurov at Photographylife.com called me up a few days ago and told me he was now the sole US distributor of the most revolutionary sensor cleaning product on the market. I have to admit, I've always been too scared to clean my own sensors. Trying to figure out which specific sensor cleaning swab to purchase has always made me question if we should even be cleaning our sensors in the first place. Maybe this is a task meant to be left for the true professionals.
Nasim laid all my worries to rest when he told me that this Sensor Gel Stick was the easiest and safest way to clean your sensor. Not only that, but professional camera manufacturers like Leica, Nikon, and Canon actually use this exact product in their own factories.
Being pretty handy myself, I asked, "If this is the exact same product being used to clean my sensor when I ship it to Nikon, then why in the world can I not do this myself?" Well I decided to clean my first sensor today on one of my own DSLR cameras....and I committed to it all live on video.
Here are the full res examples showing the dust spots on my Nikon D300s sensor before cleaning and after cleaning with the Sensor Gel Stick:
As you can see in the examples, my D300s camera was filthy. I bought this camera back in 2009 when it first came out. My Nikon D300s has now since been retired to only wedding photobooth duty. Since my photobooth setup uses studio lights, I'm often shooting at smaller apertures like f10 or f16. As you can imagine, these specks of dust can cause all sorts of editing problems when you have hundreds of photobooth photos with white backgrounds. As soon as I received the Sensor Gel Stick, I knew this was the first camera to test to see how clean I could get the sensor. The results are pretty amazing especially considering much of this dust has probably been on the sensor for years!
After having great success with a few of the D300s cameras laying around the Fstoppers office, I decided to see how much dust was on my year old Nikon D600 camera. I've heard a lot of horror stories about how dirty the D600 sensor can get and obviously there is also that notorious "oil stain" issue that many claim was the reason for the Nikon D610 release. To my surprise my Nikon D600 camera was even dirtier than my 5 year old D300s camera! Having become a pro sensor cleaning in just 20 minutes, I decided it was time to up the ante and clean one of my work horse cameras. You can see the results of the Nikon D600 below.
NOTE: AFTER INVESTIGATING THIS A BIT MORE, I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND CLEANING THE MIRROR WITH THIS DEVICE. SEE MY RESPONSE IN THE COMMENTS BELOW: After cleaning a handful of Nikon D300s, D600, and D800 cameras, I thought maybe this Sensor Gel Stick would help me clean the mirror and viewfinder on my older Nikon D300s cameras. After five years of heavy use, it was pretty embarrassing to look through the viewfienders of these crop sensor cameras. There was dust, dirt, and grime all over the viewfinder. As expected, the Gel Stick did a great job removing all the mess and restoring my oldest cameras to "like new" condition.
All in all, I have to say Lee and I were extremely impressed with this product. Cleaning a sensor used to seem scary as hell but now I would have no reservation cleaning any camera with a digital sensor in it. Obviously I do not have experience with how long each stick will last or how many pieces of sticky paper I might go through in a year (I'll probably only clean my cameras once or twice a year), but at $40 this thing is totally worth it.
If you have any questions or concerns, leave them in the comments below as I'm sure Nasim can answer a lot of the technical aspects of the Sensor Gel Stick better than I can. Also feel free to post your before and after images. I'm curious if anyone has a dirtier sensor than I did and how well it cleans up after the process.
WARNING for Sony NEX-7 users! After reading the article here I purchased the Gel Stick and used it successfully this morning to clean a Canon 1ds Mark III and a 5D II. I just used it for my Sony NEX-7 and by all looks of it destroyed it. After placing the gel tip onto the sensor to remove dust, adhesive material (sticky stuff) attached itself to the sensor as you see in the vertical image below. I then used the usual sensor swaps but only managed to make things worse as you see in the next photo. The damage done looks permanent, whatever is on the sensor won't come off effectively bricking the camera. Can't tell you how pissed off I am with this...
Warning on Sony NEX/ALPHA ILCs: The sensor is apparently coated with a special antistatic coating. Thus using the gel stick is not recommended. The gel stick gets stuck immediately to the sensor and takes some effort to get it off without damaging the sensor. I learned the hard way. However, I used wet swabs - it took 10 wet sweeps of the sensor - and managed to remove the residue from the NEX7 sensor. By the way I had no problem using the gel stick on my Nikons.
Han, quick question - did you try using the sensor gel stick again after wet cleaning?
Thanks Nasim for the advice. Indeed I had first cleaned my Nikons before trying the gel stick on the Sony. Since wet swabbing the NEX sensor I have not tried the gel stick on it. I will though and let you know.
Please do. But before you do it, please make sure that you clean the head well with the sticky paper. Would love to find out what happens. I think that the same behavior will not repeat - the coating is most likely much stronger initially and probably goes back to normal after first wet cleaning. I bet that was the first time you cleaned your NEX?
Meanwhile, it turns out that Richard is local here close to Denver area. He will be bringing his NEX-7 to me for cleaning (will do it as a courtesy). Will post some information about this after I am done.
Thank you for your feedback and your patience. I wish all manufacturers standardized on the coating technologies they use, but I guess that will never happen :)
UGH. I just did the same thing. Wish I had read this first.
finally!!! i need clean my D600 U.U haha!
I've been just spraying out my camera with the gardan hose... only problem is I have to wait 48 hours till it dries out before i can use it again.... perhaps I'll buy one of these.
So why would you guys do a review on a product and then when we order it, it's not available? I ordered this item back in March and every few weeks I get an email saying that it's still on backorder and will be shipped by the end of the month. Well the end of the month has come and gone several times. I've seen about 3 or 4 reviews on this product, so apparently it's only available for review and not actually for sale.
I just want to add some comment.
This is nothing new actually, because i have used similar product around 4 or 5 years ago! When I was still using Canon 1D and 1Ds that time. I can say this is the best product, especially if you have old camera. There are quite many different type of cleaning tool but actually it's not working properly, especially the type using liquid.
And as for this specific brand, looks like quite ok quality. And if you are living in Europe, you can order from Germany or eBay.de directly. Cost around 23 ~30 Euro. Of course there are a lot of similar off-brand from eBay, choice is yours.
I myself ordered one for my old 1DS Mark II recently, which is my back up camera due to its extraordinary fantastic color even though it's 10 years old model.
And one more, whether this is used for engineers from the major companies, yes, i can say. Not same but similar product. Especially for quick service tool when they do service at the fair or exhibition for free cleaning.
Don't worry too much about the damage of the sensor. I did more than 100 times before. Sensor is sensitive, but this is not the one can damage it. :)
Kevin (from Sweden)
I bought one of these (a genuine one, from Eyelead in Germany), and used it once, exactly as instructed, on a Nikon D4. It pulled up a piece of the IR coating on the sensor. I sent it to Nikon UK for repair. I now have a repair bill for £1440, despite the camera still being in warranty. Nikon won’t honour the warranty, and say I shouldn’t have been cleaning my sensor. They also claim no knowledge of the product and David Phillips – head of Nikon customer services in the UK – says they don’t use any Eyelead products and have no connection with the company (despite a lot of people claiming that Nikon use Eyelead in their service centres). So, Nikon have washed their hands of it, and Eyelead claim the problem was with manufacture of the sensor on the D4 and not a problem with their product. Eyelead have offered a replacement Gel Stick – an offer which for obvious reasons I’m reluctant to accept. Upshot is - BE VERY WARY OF ANY CLAIMS SURROUNDING THIS PRODUCT, AND USE AT YOUR PERIL.
After reading those great reviews of this product I bought it earlier this summer. Unfortunately I had a crazy idea of taking it with me for a photo trip and even worse using it on my Sony A7R. The result was much much much more of spots on sensor and even worse square traces left by this stick. $ days of shooting on a remote location results are a horror of removing the spots ... if this is possible. As I did not take with e my wet cleaning set it was a nightmare when I was thinking about the risk of not being able to remove these traces back home. Very poor if existent service. No replies for emails. The third email I got a reply ... saying sorry, what is your camera and please send us a picture ... Ok I did that and for a week no reply. I decided again to push and the same person replied that it was because of his business journey somewhere ... Come on is there only ONE person in this company replying emails from customers !!! Never use that product again ! Beware you have been warned
Do you think this will be effective at all for getting rid of smudges?
Hi there, can the orange gel stick be used on Nikon cameras? I have a D750 and seem to have received the wrong one from Amazon... Is it ok to used this one on my sensor or should i send it back?
Thanks for the video. If we're looking for debris on the sensor, not anything in front of the sensor, why does it matter what aperture is used? If anything, it seems like using a small aperture would result in being able to see more debris that's in or in front of the lens, which might obscure debris on the sensor itself. In fact, wouldn't it be better to take the test shot with no lens on the camera?
I don't know the details of why the price was increased but I've made a physical product myself. We originally sold it in the US and then decided to ship it to Europe to sell there as well. What I learned is that in order to make a profit, we had to increase the price quite a bit to cover the importing, the VAT taxes, we had to hire a firm to submit our quarterly VAT taxes owed on the products we sold, we had fees for Amazon, etc etc.
My point is that you never know the hidden costs acquired by resellers or distributors until you jump into the game like Nasim has done with the sensor cleaning. At some point, even if you make a "slight" profit, the headaches associated with offering the product out weigh any desire to make a small profit and eventually you just give up on that product altogether.
I also know that Nasim originally was hand mailing these sensor gel sticks. I'm sure if he has automated that process or found some company to fulfill the orders for him then some extra costs were added there too. Trust me, packaging up 1-20 boxes every 4 days and driving them to the post office is a HUGE pain in the ass. I know because I did it for a while :)
Did anybody use the stick to remove residues of wet cleaning?
I have no problems with the idea behind these gel sticks but after looking at the videos (using the blue colored sticks) they seem overly sticky and I fear could cause damage to the innards of the camera. I would think that it wouldn't take much in the way of 'stickiness' to pull of a bit of dust from a sensor. To see the effort needed to pull that gel away from the glass filter doesn't give me much confidence using it inside a camera.
Hello guys. Can someone please help me with a info: I have ordered this gel stick and on the box is a sticker with the writing "Leica & Sony" and has a red head. Is this safe to use with a Nikon D800 and a D4s??? Thank you very much.