The best camera sensor cleaner: these kits will banish dark spots from your photos

Every photographer ends up with the same problem sooner or later: a faint dark speck sitting in the exact same spot on every frame, whatever you point the lens at. It's not a smudge on the front element and it's not a scratch on the glass. It's dust on the sensor, and unlike a dirty window, it doesn't blow away on its own.

Sensors pick up dust surprisingly easily. Swapping lenses is the obvious culprit, but even zooms that extend and retract can pump air and dust straight into the mirror box or lens mount. Once a particle lands on or near the sensor's cover glass, it tends to stay exactly where it landed, ruining the same corner of every shot until something dislodges it.

The good news is that you don't need to send your camera away or book it in for a professional service every time this happens. A proper sensor cleaning kit, used carefully, will sort out the vast majority of dust, smears and light oil spots yourself, at home, for a fraction of the cost of a shop clean. The trick is picking the right tool for the job: a blower for loose dust, dry swabs for a bit more, and wet swabbing with fluid for anything stubborn enough to shrug off the first two. Here are our best buys right now.

Matthew Richards

Matthew Richards is a photographer and journalist who has spent years using and reviewing all manner of photo gear. He is Digital Camera World's principal lens reviewer – and has tested more primes and zooms than most people have had hot dinners!

Best overall sensor cleaning kit

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A quick look at the VisibleDust website can be a daunting experience. The company offers a vast range of products from lamps and loupes, through air blowers and brushes, to swabs and liquids, catering to any and every sensor cleaning requirements. I went for one of the EZ Sensor Cleaning Kits. These wet swab kits are again available in many and varied options, but it’s actually pretty easy to hone in on your ideal kit. A section of the website lists an enormous range of cameras, with information on what swab size you need.

Next up, there’s a guide to three different formulations and strengths of liquid, ranging from Sensor Clean, through VDust Plus to Smear Away, and information on the alternative green and orange sensor cleaning Vswabs. I settled on a kit containing the orange swabs and VDust Plus liquid, the components of which are designed to work together as a medium-strength cleaning solution. The liquid tackles both water-based and oil-based stains, while the ultra-soft swabs have a unique woven pattern that maximizes absorbency while minimizing any risk of stray fibers being shed.

As always, I used an air blower to shift any loose dust before setting to with the wet swabs. My chosen kit contained a small vial of liquid and four swabs. Only a couple of drops of liquid are required and the swabs have flexible stems that provide good tactile feedback. I found the kit to be highly effective at removing even stubborn stains from our test camera’s image sensor, and the solution also applies a moderate anti-static barrier to avoid subsequent contamination.

Best air blower

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Small specs of dust floating around in the air can easily drift into your camera when you’re changing lenses, and even when you’re zooming in and out with a lens that telescopes rather than having an internal zoom mechanism. Thankfully, they can just as easily be blown out again with an air blower.

A problem is that air blowers suck air in so they can blow it out again when you give them a squeeze, and the air that’s sucked in can contain specs of dust that you’ll then fire at your image sensor. The worst-case scenario from a cleaning point of view is that you can end up with more dust on your image sensor than when you started.

The JJC Professional Dust Free Air Blower is designed to be a more effective solution. The trick is that it features a pair of one-way valves, fitted to the air intake at the back and behind the output nozzle at the front. Air is therefore only sucked in at the back and to avoid any dust being ingested, the inlet is covered by a filter that traps any specs of dust or other particles with a diameter of more than 21 micrometers. Of course, no filter lasts forever, but the kit comes with three additional filters and a tool for replacing them.

The air blower feels of good quality in the hand, with a grippy silicone airbag. Better still, a soft silicone cap is fitted to the front end of the nozzle, avoiding any potential damage if you make a slip and it comes into contact with the image sensor itself. With its large airbag, I found that the blower had a good deal of puff and did a very respectable job of clearing loose dust from the image camera. As always, I used the blower with the camera’s lens flange facing downwards. This helps loose dust to fall out and reduces the risk of more dust from the air falling into the camera. All in all, the blower does a good job but is no substitute for dry or wet swabbing if you have stubborn particles or stains on your image sensor.

Best dry swab cleaning kit

Try blowing dust off a bathroom mirror and you'll often find that even after all the puff you can muster, it just stays put. Without resorting to washing it down, a quick wipe with a dry cloth is generally all that's needed to clean it up. These dry swabs work on the same principle. I'd always use an air blower first, to shift any loose dust, but dry swabbing is the next step.

The JJC CL-F24K2 Full Frame Sensor Cleaner was clearly designed with DSLRs in mind. Not only do they have long handles, ideal for stretching through the reflex mirror section of a camera, but they come complete with a pictorial step-by-step guide on how to lock up the mirror and open the shutter for cleaning, in both Canon and Nikon DSLRs, and the guide is neatly printed in full color.

Not just for DSLRs with full-frame CCD or CMOS image sensors, the swabs are equally effective for mirrorless cameras, where the long handles give plenty of room for maneuvering, and they're also available in a smaller swab width for APS-C format cameras. The swabs themselves have a preferable V-shaped profile and a high-quality double-layer microfiber tongue, with JJC rating this upgraded version at around 2.7 times the cleaning power of the original CL-F24K it replaces. 

Best compact multi-purpose cleaning kit

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Testing this K&F kit gave our trusty and very well-used Sony camera a chance to clean up its act. The kit contains two microfiber cloths which are good for cleaning any and all of the surfaces on the camera and lens. Next up, there’s a ‘lens pen’ which has the typical extending brush at one end and a removable triangular profile pad at the other.

For harder-to-reach places, including the camera’s image sensor, there’s an air blower. However, it’s quite a basic affair. Air is sucked in as well as being blown out through the nozzle at the front. The upshot is that once you’ve blown some dust off a surface, it might easily be sucked in through the nozzle and blown out again next time around.

The final component of the kit is a pair of individually vacuum-packed dry swabs. With cleaning pads measuring 24mm in width, they’re sized for full-frame image sensors. The swabs themselves are very short but slot into the end of the lens pen, which greatly increases their overall length. Even so, you can use them on their own for mirrorless cameras, where the image sensor isn’t deeply recessed in, compared with a DSLR that has a reflex mirror assembly. Replacement swabs are available separately, in packs of various quantities, and for APS-C format as well as full-frame sensors.

I found that the kit certainly had our Sony camera looking very presentable again but the air blower isn’t particularly effective and the swab handles are a little inflexible for my liking.

Best multi-purpose cleaning kit for travel

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I’ve got an old Nikon D7100 that’s seen better days and spends most of its time nowadays sitting on the shelf at the back of a wardrobe. Testing this multi-purpose cleaning kit gave me the opportunity to restore it to its former glory. The first thing I noticed about the Movo kit is that the retail box is much larger than anything else I was testing. The reason is two-fold. Firstly, the kit contains a wide range of cleaning items and, secondly, they come complete in a neat zip-up soft case. That makes the kit ideal for stashing in my luggage if I’m traveling or just going out on a photo trip.

Catering to pretty much any camera cleaning job, the kit contains an air blower, a lens pen with a retractable brush and circular pad with a removable cap at the back end, two 6-inch microfiber cloths, and two 9-inch microfiber cloths. Getting down to the nitty-gritty of sensor cleaning, the kit also contains a soft sensor brush, 10 APS-C-sized swabs, and a bottle of liquid cleaning solution for use with the swabs. The swabs as well as the microfiber cloths are individually vacuum-packed.

The air blower is a pretty basic affair, sucking unfiltered air in through both a valve at the rear plus the output nozzle at the front, but at least it has a soft silicone tip at the end of the nozzle to guard against causing any accidental damage. I’m not convinced about the usefulness of the sensor brush but the swabs and cleaning liquid performed well in my tests. With fairly little effort, my aging Nikon D7100 was soon seeing better days, inside and out.

Best value wet swab cleaning kit

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Like the Canadian VisibleDust company, the USA-based Photographic Solutions outfit has been in the camera cleaning business a long time, earning an excellent reputation along the way. A range of products is available, including an Orbit HEPA Blower for filtered dust-free and moisture-free air output (as used on the International Space Station, no less), lint-free E-Wipes and Pec*Pads, and of course, sensor cleaning swabs and fluid.

The range of swabs covers different sizes including medium format, full-frame, APS-C, and even APS-H (remember that?). I went for the ‘Type 3’ 24mm Sensor Cleaning Swab Kit, which includes six full-frame sensor-sized swabs and a bottle of Eclipse cleaning fluid. The fluid is guaranteed safe to use on CCD and CMOS sensors, advertised to dry instantly with no streaks nor residue. It’s engineered to work in harmony with the Pec*Pads and SensorSwab Ultra swabs, the latter featured in the kit I’m testing. An alternative liquid is also available, by the name of Aeroclipse, which has all the same advantages but is also non-flammable and TSA-approved as travel-safe.

The swabs have a nicely flexible handle that enables me to maintain a firm (but not too firm) pressure while swabbing the sensor. The business end is made from double-layer microfiber cloth, the inner layer locking in liquid and the outer with advanced stain-cleaning properties. The swabs are designed to not shed any fibers, have welded seams, and are individually packed in ‘clean room’ conditions.

I found the performance of the Photographic Solutions Sensor Cleaning Swab Kit to be excellent. After using an air blower to remove any loose dust, the combination of the swabs and liquid gave me a really clean image sensor, living up to their promise of safely removing dust, dirt, and oil/water-based smudges and smears.

Sensor cleaning results

This gallery of four photos features a blank white wall. They were taken with our Sony A7R III camera, which the Digital Camera World team use extensively for testing scores of different lenses and other equipment, as well as on wide-ranging photo shoots. Suffice it to say, lenses attached to the camera are changed countless times. The series of four shots demonstrate dust spots and other contamination on the sensor in its initial state, then after cleaning with an air blower, followed by dry swabbing and finally wet swabbing. You’ll see the differences if you zoom in on the photos.

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How to choose

1. Wet or dry?
Carefully using specially designed swabs and solution will remove most gunk from your sensor, while a simple air blower puffs dust away for a quick clean. It is good practice to do a dry clean with a blower, before moving onto a dry or wet clean with swabs.

2. The perfect view
A kit with a loupe and light will really help you see what and where needs cleaning. Some designs also enable you to clean while the loupe rests on the lens mount. See our guide to the best loupes for DIY kit options. If you buy a kit without a light, a headtorch is an excellent alternative, as it keeps your hands free.

3. Plan ahead
A basic blower will never run out of puff but, if you plump for a wet cleaning kit, the included swabs and solution will only go so far. Make sure that replacements are readily available and don’t cost a fortune.

4. Fit for purpose
Camera sensors are delicate devices, so only use swabs and solution specifically designed for cleaning imaging sensors – not just optical glass.

5. Get the right size
Swabs for dry or wet cleaning come in different sizes - get the right size for the sensor, so that you can clean the whole surface with one pass of the swab.

6. Less is more
Hurricane blowers may be safe for a sensor, but don’t be tempted to up the ante with a compressed air canister. Their high pressure and freezing propellant can cause serious damage!

How we test

At DCW, our team of photographic experts test a huge amount of photographic equipment, including cameras, lenses and accessories such as camera sensor cleaning kits. We test gear in real-world conditions as well as controlled lab settings, in order to assess how well it will perform in different shooting scenarios. For sensor cleaning kits, we test both how easy it is to use the kit, and how effective it is at removing dust and dirt from a camera sensor.

Find out more about how we test and review on Digital Camera World