Photographic Solutions Sensor Swab Type 2 for 1.6x DSLR cameras
Sensor Swab is made by Photographic Solutions and is quite expensive for a disposable product. They are about 5-6 euros each. 64 euros for a box of 12 from micro-tools and you get two sweeps with them. Other places offer them at 50 euro.
Certainly you do not want to use the sensor swab for more than one sweep on each side of the DSLR sensor because you will probably re-contaminate the sensor and this time worse than before.
You use them by putting one or two drops of Eclipse solution on one side and then make one sweep from one side of the sensor to the other. Then you flip it over and put another one or two drops of Eclipse on the other side and then make one sweep the other way.
It is highly likely that you will need 2 swabs for one cleaning. That is of course unless you use the same swab for more than one sweep. In that case you would probably need another 4 or so swabs to clean the mess and considering how much they cost you would probably never make that mistake again.
If we take one apart we can see that it is a little spatula with a folded piece of what is rather like lens tissue. This is folded four times and then secured to the spatula with a little rubber band.
The large piece of tissue in the above picture is a pec-pad. Is the tissue on the sensor swabs the same as pec-pads. No it is not, it is rather more like a paper tissue than the their shiny fibres. Personally although many people like pec-pads i was not impressed, it was quite difficult to clean just a filter without smearing using them, let alone a sensor.
I suppose some people would be wondering if they could renew their old sensor swabs by cutting and folding a pec pad. The main concern would be getting finger grease on the pec pad when it is cut and folded into that small shape. Definitely surgical gloves would be recommended. In the end I think it would be more fiddly and liable to be less successful than the sensor wand method.
In the end, the photographic solutions sensor swabs are highly recommended even though they cost so much. They make what could be a frustrating and fiddly job quite easy. Once you try them it is unlikely you would use another method.
