I finally decided to buy something to clean the sensor on my Sony A200 camera. The dust spots were becoming a problem and I was taking more and more time fixing them in the digital darkroom. So I bought a rocket blower from Jessops. Even though it was packaged as an own-brand product, the markings on the blower clearly stated it was a Giottos product, which is just what I wanted.

So following a guide I found online, here’s how effective the product was in removing dust from my camera sensor. This picture shows the state of the sensor before any cleaning, with big spots of dust highly visible:

After the first round of blowing, the results are clear to see, with most of the big dust spots gone, however there is still some persistent spots around the bottom corners of the picture:

After the second round of directed blowing in an attempt to shift some of the corner dirt, the sensor looked a little cleaner, but not by much:

So I tried one more time. This time I seemed to be introducing dirt back onto the sensor so I gave up. There are still some speckles of dirt around the corners, and there seems to be light stubborn spots in the centre which will require a wet solution or some other form of direct sensor contact cleaning. Here is the final result, which although not perfect, is pretty good compared to no cleaning at all: