We recently noticed a lot of spots in pictures we were taking with our Nikon D80 camera. A quick Google search suggested we needed to clean dust off the mirrors and the other internal components. “Canned air” works well for cleaning dust out of nooks and crannies that all electronic devices have, but there are problems with it. Have you ever held the nozzle a little too close to your device? You’ll see an area of frost left behind, if you do. When the frost evaporates, there’s often residue left behind. We didn’t want to risk damaging anything inside the camera, so we decided to look for something safer. Giottos, a manufacturer of photographic equipment, had just what we needed. Their Rocket Air Blasters are designed to clean delicate camera equipment with a puff of room temperature air, so you don’t have to worry about damage from the extremely cold air. The Rocket Air Blasters come in three sizes, small (shown on the right), medium, and large (shown on the left). They are made from natural rubber, and they have a one-way valve to prevent the Rocket from pulling in dusty air and redepositing it. We tried the large size, and it cleaned out the dust from our camera with only a couple of puffs. We keep the large one at home and bought a small one to keep in our camera bag. Amazon carries all three sizes of the Rocket Air Blasters for $9-10 each.
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Note – when travelling with one do not keep in hand luggage/camera bag, put in main luggage – airport staff were not amused…….
I have had a rocket blaster for several years and used it on all my camera equipment. It is a great tool and it never dawned on me to use it instead of canned air for other electronics cleaning. Thanks for the reminder!
With a DSLR camera the mirror flips out of the way when the shutter is fired (how else will the light reflecting off the image hit the sensor or film.) Cleaning the mirror doesn’t do anything in respect to spots in the final image. The sensor itself needs to be cleaned. It’s easiest just to drop it off at the repair shop or camera store. If you feel comfortable doing it yourself (the sensor is a bit hard to reach and you certainly don’t want to damage it) then there are specific tool kits to clean sensors. Blowing air all over the inside can just create more dust to land on the sensor. Even easier is to simply leave it alone and use the healing brush in Photoshop 🙂
They are cheaper if you buy them by their generic name… “Enema syringe”. And for finer applications, their baby brother “Ear syringe”.
Enema syringes are allowed on flights, things that look like weapons are not. 😉