Nikon D7000 manual Clean Your Sensor

Chapter 14 ■ Nikon D7000: Troubleshooting and Prevention 477

Clean Your Sensor

Yes, the Nikon D7000 has a two-pronged sensor dust prevention scheme: an innova- tive air control system that keeps dust away from the sensor in the first place, and a sen- sor-shaking cleaning mechanism. But no dust-busting technology is 100-percent effective.

Indeed, there’s no avoiding dust. No matter how careful you are, some of it is going to settle on your camera and on the mounts of your lenses, eventually making its way inside your camera to settle in the mirror chamber. As you take photos, the mirror flipping up and down causes the dust to become airborne and eventually make its way past the shut- ter curtain to come to rest on the anti-aliasing filter atop your sensor. There, dust and particles can show up in every single picture you take at a small enough aperture to bring the foreign matter into sharp focus. No matter how careful you are and how cleanly you work, eventually you will get some of this dust on your camera’s sensor. Some say that CMOS sensors, like the one found in the Nikon D7000, “attract” less dust than CCD sensors found in cameras from other vendors. But even the cleanest-working photo- graphers using the Nikon D7000 are far from immune.

Fortunately, one of the Nikon D7000’s most useful features is the automatic sensor cleaning system that reduces or eliminates the need to clean your camera’s sensor man- ually. The sensor vibrates ultrasonically each time the D7000 is powered either on or off (or both, at your option), shaking loose any dust.

Although the automatic sensor cleaning feature operates when you power the camera up or turn it off (depending on the behavior you specify in the Setup menu), you can activate it manually at any time. Choose Clean Image Sensor from the Setup menu, and select Clean Now. If you’d rather specify when automatic cleaning occurs, choose On (clean at power up), Off (clean when the camera is switched off), On/Off (clean at both power up and power down), or Cleaning Off (no automatic sensor cleaning will take place).

If some dust does collect on your sensor, you can often map it out of your images (mak- ing it invisible) using software techniques with the Image Dust Off Ref Photo feature in the Setup menu. Operation of this feature is described in Chapter 10.

Of course, even with the Nikon D7000’s automatic sensor cleaning/dust resistance fea- tures, you may still be required to manually clean your sensor from time to time. This section explains the phenomenon and provides some tips on minimizing dust and elim- inating it when it begins to affect your shots.