Canon EOS 40D: Sensor Cleaning

Video Transcript

"Another new feature on the Canon 40D is its automatic sensor cleaning which happens on command or when you turn the camera off or on. In this case my camera is on right now, but if I turn it off, you can see that for a couple of seconds the sensor cleaning turns on. That will also happen when I turn the camera on. If you'll see when I turn the camera on, the sensor cleaning screen comes up for a couple of seconds. All that's doing is it's shaking the sensor very, very quickly and at a low or high frequency to get rid of some of the dust that often accumulates, and a lot of times has been a real pain for photographers to get rid of, because you have to manually open up the mirror and the shutter and get in there and actually clean the sensor manually. Another way to do this is by activating it manually through the menu. What I can do is just hit the menu button at the top, left side of my camera, and what I'm going to do is scroll through with the main dial. All the way to the second wrench. It's a yellow icon with a wrench on it and two dots, and then what I'm going to do scroll around here, down to sensor cleaning, and highlight that with a yellow rectangle in this menu, and then press set from the quick control dial. Again I was scrolling through here with the quick control dial on the back of the camera. And now I've selected sensor cleaning, I'm going to go ahead and press set, and I have three options. Right now that auto cleaning function that I showed you a couple of seconds ago happens when you turn the camera on or turn it off. Right now that's enabled. You could disable that if you wanted to by selecting disable. I'm going to go ahead and leave that enabled because I like to have a clean sensor. I can also manually clean this sensor by actually opening up the front of camera, taking the lens off, and then getting in there with a brush and blowing it out, but that's actually fairly tedious and kind of dangerous for your camera and its sensor and the light getting in there and all the other elements. Not preferred. If you have to, it's definitely possible, but I don't recommend it. Right now, I could also select the "clean now" option which just, it's going to perform an auto cleaning, sensor cleaning right away, right now. So if I press set, I have the option to, say, clean the sensor with this camera function. Yes, or cancel. I'm going to say okay. And the sensor is cleaning. You can hear - the shutter sounds like it opens and closes. That actually does not happen. It's just making a noise. But the sensors should be clean at that point. It doesn't do a whole lot of good to perform that "clean now" function over and over again at the same time. It pretty much gets the job done just by doing one cleaning session every so often. For the most part, the auto cleaning should be sufficient by having that selected, your camera will automatically clean when you turn your camera on and off."