| Dust and other small particles easily can enter the interior of
your digital or film SLR while you’re changing lenses or through
normal daily use. With every twist of a zoom lens, air is being
forced in and out of the camera body, sucking in dust and other
micro-particles.
With film cameras, any dust specks that gather in the film cell
move as the film is advanced and don’t have a chance to accumulate,
so only one frame is potentially affected. With digital SLRs, the
problem becomes more severe because dust particles that settle on
the image sensor tend to stay there and accumulate until they’re
removed, thus impacting every image. In most digital SLRs, an airtight
seal isolates and protects the delicate sensor; the optical glass
or filter situated in front of the sensor is what accumulates dust
and requires cleaning.
There’s just no way to avoid the notorious dust problem characteristic
of interchangeable-lens cameras; there are only ways of dealing
with it. Most manufacturers recommend that you send the camera to
an authorized service center to be professionally cleaned, but it
can take weeks to get your camera back, and who wants to be without
their camera for that long?
Cleaning your sensor manually also is an option, but requires special
tools, time and a whole lot of patience, and doesn’t always
result in a completely dust-free sensor. We know how delicate and
tedious the task can be and apparently so do the camera manufacturers.
There has been considerable interest in developing technology to
minimize or remove dust, both in the editing phase using programs
such as Nikon’s Image Dust Off or directly from the camera’s
interior.
Olympus features a simple, yet effective anti-dust solution in its
E-1 and EVOLT E-300 digital SLRs. The patented Supersonic Wave Filter,
located between the shutter and the CCD, features a tiny engine
that emits a series of high-speed ultrasonic vibrations that shake
most kinds of dust particles off the glass in front of the sensor.
The particles are collected onto a special adhesive strip that then
can be removed and cleaned.
The filter engine vibrates 350,000 times a second and is automatically
set in motion every time the camera is powered up and during pixel
mapping. You also can manually activate it through the camera’s
menu at any time. It may seem a little strange to have a camera
convulsing every time you turn it on, but the rapid vibrations actually
are quite discrete and perform their duty quickly and efficiently.
The concept is so basic and intuitive that this remarkable feature
often has been glossed over as a side note. An ingenious solution
to an irksome problem that plagues every digital photographer, we
think Olympus’ Supersonic Wave Filter is deserving of greater
attention. When such a technological advancement is made, we can
only hope that it finds its way into every digital camera, whether
it’s manufactured by Olympus or one of its competitors. Ultimately,
the goal is to create the best-quality images, and to do that, you
need to keep your sensor clean.
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