Sensor cleaning... you out or you in?

I also use the eclipse fluid and pec pad method. Here's a link that helps out with sensor cleaning, it sure helped me.
http://www.pbase.com/copperhill/ccd_cleaning

 

too scared so far, alathough as i hear from more who have done it i may stand up
gary

 

Ugh! That's why I hate DSLRs. I use a rocket blower if there are just some minor dust bunnies on the sensor. If that doesn't help, I'll use a static brush. Pec pads are a last resort.

 

I take mine to a technician to be cleaned once a month. From my workplace alone he cleans 18 cameras each month.

 

Pecpads and eclipse for me. Blowers have given me partial sucess, but they never clean every dust spot, and after a few tries they add more new dirt instead of removing old dirt. Straight out of the box my 30D had an incredibly dirty sensor that a blower couldn't even half clean. It sounds like that's strangely common, I have no idea what kind of conditions these cameras are manufactured in but it can't be very clean. It took quite a few attempts to get it clean enough for me to be happy. I'm dreading looking, but I'm sure it's gotten dirty since then, I should probably clean it before Disney World this December. I probably won't use high enough Fstops to show the dust though, so I might just ignore it.
This summer the original dust blatently showed up though when I had to use a narrower aperture in order to slow the shutter speed down when shooting aircraft. I was trying to blur the propeller blades.

I hold my breath every time I do it, but I don't mean to suggest that I'm still scared. I was at first, of course, but after I did it a few times I relaxed. It's just that I'm trying to avoid contaminating the insides of my camera, I have no way to be sure that my breath would go away from the camera. I also try to wait until the furnace for the house isn't running so the air is more still, hoping that that means that the dust in the air is likely to have settled.
For the record my house is probably quite dusty, I have a cat who's shedding quite a lot, fur shows up everywhere. This is probably far from ideal. But still the copperhill method works rather well for me. Not perfectly, I usually have at least a few tiny specks left, and I never get to that level after one wipe either. But in the end I get to a point where I'm happy and stop. Or else eventually I'll start introducing more dust in the time that the shutter is open, there's a point of diminishing returns.

I'm not scared about it.. but I still don't like it. It's not easy to do, the 30D seems a little harder than the Digital Rebel. It's like there's something that's catching on the pecpad and making it get stuck, I have to be more careful and sometimes I don't quite manage to cover the entire sensor with a particular attempt. But what I don't like is the difficulty of it, and the fact that after every wipe I throw out the pad, close up the camera, and take a test shot to see if I got all the dust. Then I have to put the memory card in my computer, look at it, check for dust, then I usually have to go back and do it over a few times. It's a pain in the butt, especially since my computer is in the basement but I do the work upstairs where things are a bit cleaner. I've more or less accepted that, logically, this process should be fairly safe though. The pecpad is nice and soft, the eclipse evaporates perfectly, and the spatula has enough give to it that really my sensor should be nice and protected.

I'm not advising everyone to do it though. Of course it IS possible to damage the surface of the sensor. But I scratched my D-reb's sensor just using a blower. Kind of. I was probably holding the camera the wrong way, I was looking down into it and holding the blower above it. But when I was using the blower something fell off it and into the camera, and hit the sensor. I think it left a tiny scratch, there's one small dust looking mark that I can't remove. The object was a metal ring, I never noticed it but it must have been on the blower originally, and it fell off when I was using it.
So the supposedly safe blower method backfired for me. But the method that some people say you should never do has been good to me. I'm not advising people one way or the other.. just reporting what's worked for me.
And about the poor Digital Rebel's sensor. I was devestated at first, of course. But eventually I realized that that mark didn't show up in normal pictures, and I relaxed. Live and learn, go with the now, that sort of thing.

 

Professional cleaner for me - in between, Photoshop!!!

 

Ive only had my Rebel for a little over a year and so far, I haven't needed to clean it. I'm only at about 15,000 snaps.