Ethanol or methanol for sensor cleaning

I was about to buy some Eclipse + Sensor swabs to clean my D70, when I came across this thread. I was concerned by Vivek's comments about colour coming off the filter, so I emailed Photographic Solutions. This is the reply I got from David Stone:

 

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The coloring is most likely the IR layer coating. The filter was installed by Nikon upside down ! I know this sounds preposterous, but we have seen this several times......

Otherwise, Eclipse and Swabs are totally safe, ergo, our guarantee !

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This does seem amazing, if true!

Grant.

According to this page http://www.bythom.com/cleaning.htm

some cameras have an exposed Indium Tin Oxide coating, the Nikon D70 being one of them.

 

This is probably what comes off when cleaning with methanol.

 

The other chips without a coating should be safe to clean with methanol.

Old thread but I thought I'd tack on. Earlier I mentioned acetone, but only for the scientific optics I clean. The odds of messing up a camera or sensor with it are far too high. Don't do that. My D200 sensor hasn't been cleaned since I bought it, maybe ten years ago! The dust wasn't noticeable, but I didn't think the images had quite the quality they used to.

 

First, I set up a bellows with some aluminum foil and a pinhole so I could see where things stood. The exposure will be several seconds at low ISO, so you point it at clear sky and move it around during the exposure to get an even exposure of highly directional light. Then convert to grey-scale and jack the contrast a bit.

 

 

The "before" exposure showed not only dust, but some weird film or deposit over the entire sensor. (image is reduced in size from original) Maybe it's oil or out-gassing products.

 

 

Being a cheap old fart, I went DIY for cleaning. I had access to some spectrophotometric grade isopropanol, which leaves zero residue. I folded my own swabs from Kimwipes. Some don't like those, but I've used them in an optical setting for decades without problem. It took me a couple tries, and there remain some smaller dust spots, but they don't show up on images and the weirdness is gone. Remember that the pinhole technique is stupidly sensitive for showing things that you'll never see with real images. Unless you shoot a lot of pinhole images. :) The color rendition and overall image quality seems improved.

 

 

I'll probably check the sensor more often now!

 

I change lenses frequently as my camera ranges from telephoto lenses to microscope lenses. Dust is always a problem. While searching for a good sensor cleaner, I found this discussions about methanol. The fears of using HEET did not deter me as I'm also a chemist. Heet worked great immediately and was far better than other alcohols I tried. HEET is pure methanol and has no additives that I could find. The absence of additives implies that if there were any additives, the additives could foul the engines using the HEET methanol. Ordinary cotton swabs work relatively poorly and seem to have some oils in them that can cause streaks. The tringular expensive cloth swabs removed the dust bits and did not cause streaks - if you don't overload them with the fluid. I can't imagine what in my camera would dissolve in methanol, but not in isopropyl or ethanol. I found HEET safe.

It's funny to see this old debate and the ferocious attitude even among claimed chemist of how "dangerous" methanol is toward glass and other silicates.

 

If that were the case, I wouldn't have any glassware at work!

 

There was a comment above about methanol in chromatography columns-again if this were the case when I would be in trouble running a water/methanol gradient in an ODS HPLC column-something I often do and I have ODS columns with many hundreds of hours of run time with methanol.

 

(it's worth noting that currently in literature, there's a bit of discussion on the "dissolving" effect when running a DCM-MeOH gradient in column chromatography, but it's thought this is more a physical effect related to the use of those two specific solvents. Hopefully no one is using DCM to clean their sensors!)

 

As for purity, this is the minimum I'd use for methanol. Someone above mentioned spectroscopic grade. For this sort of application, I prefer HPLC grade-it meets the same if not better purity standards as spectroscopic grades, but keeps a very tight watch on particulates since those can ruin your day in HPLC(back when I was at a place that was too poor to buy HPLC grade but I using a lot, I use to take the lower grades and filter them through a .45µm filter to cut down on particulates).

 

Methanol, 99.9%, for HPLC, ACROS Organics | Fisher Scientific

 

Methanol 34860

 

Methanol ≥99.9% ACS, Ph. Eur., super gradient grade for HPLC, suitable for UPLC/UHPLC instruments, VWR Chemicals BDH®

 

A 4L bottle is probably more than a lifetime supply for even a repair shop. At the end of the day, I'd say that Eclipse fluid is the best all-around choice even though it's expensive for the amount you get.