Re: Auto sensor cleaning - does it work?

Derek Fountain wrote:
Just reading up on the 400D, I started wondering about this sensor
cleaning thing where the sensor vibrates to shake dust off, and has an
anti-static coat of some sort. Does it actually work?

I've often wondered how well the Oly 4/3 bodies do at shaking off the
dust ... I always look for someone using one of those cameras and my
plan was to ask them could I put a CF card in and shoot a couple of
frames just to see for myself and then shoot the sky at f/22 and see if
there's any dust visible. But I've never actually seen anyone carrying
an Oly 4/3 body :)

Based on the kinds of dust I see on my Canons I'd guess this sensor
shake will get the dust off a high percentage of the time, maybe
80-95%, maybe higher? Depends on the kind of particles that stick to
the sensor, some pollen grains seem to stick and take more work to
clean off.

I believe it's been used on some other cameras, and was presumably
patented. So either Canon thought it was good enough to licence, or good
enough to make their own version of the system.

It's easy enough to get around a patent by coming up with a different
implementation. I have six US patents and all are really narrow in
scope ... the company I worked for encouraged us to patent every little
thing we could because typically a bigger company like Texas
Instruments or Motorola would say to us (a smaller startup company) we
hold 952 patents in this field and we're sure you are infringing on
some of them, so pay us X dollars to cross-license ... the bigger OUR
pile of patents was (regardless of the quality, to a surprising extent)
the less we paid because there was a chance they were infringing on one
of ours. A strange little game ...

But is it good because it works, or good because it's a marketing
gimmick in a world where people are frightened of cleaning their
sensor?

We'll know when it comes out and people have a chance to test it.
Until then it's rather pointless speculating.

Bill

.

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