How to clean your camera lenses?

Cleaning camera lenses with your shirt tails or with a paper towel is not recommended. It's preferable to use lintless material made specially for cleaning lenses.

The chamois-type cloth is okay, but you tend to keep them too long. So they get filled with fingerprint oil and are sometimes dirtier than the lens you are trying to clean.

You can get lens cleaner from Kodak or elsewhere, but now on the Internet you can obtain everything you need from one place. Photographic Solutions is a reputable company recommended by all the manufacturers of professional digital camera equipment such as PhaseOne and BetterLight.

Photographic Solutions mades Eclipse lens cleaner,, PEC*PAD tissues, e-wipe to clean off CCD's, CMOS, and so on.

Contact David Stone, david@photosol.com, or tel (800) 637-3212, or more easily go to their web site www.photosol.com.

The CCD on our Nikon D100 is so dirty that people complained about spots in the image, so we had to buy the AC adaptor; you can't clean a sensor without having the AC adaptor plugged in.

Next step is to figure out which cleaning materials to use. There are several competing brands. We will report back shortly because we have to get the CCD clean for an upcoming 2-week expedition to photograph orchids and butterflies in Guatemala.

Most recently updated November 29, 2004.
Previously updated July 3, 2003. First posted Aug 12, 2001.