Best way to clean my Canon 5dmkII sensor

I just posted this to my regional forum but decided I wanted to post to the masses so I can get as much feedback as possible.

My Canon 5DmkII is a year old now and I am starting to see a heavy increase dust spots, the auto clean function does not seem to do much good these days. I want to clean the sensor myself and was wondering what method people are using these days, what products etc I have tried using my Giotto Rocket blower but that does not seem to do any good.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Jody

In my experience, blowers, no matter if you store them in a plastic bag and purge them 10 times before using them on your sensor, always deposit as much or more dust as they blow away. After trying pens and various other swabs and fluids, the only cleaning tools I use now at Visible Dust's V-swabs and two of their fluids, VDust Plus and Smear Away. The shape of the V-swab is very useful in helping you avoid touching the chamber walls with full frame sensors, and the fluids work great yet can be taken as carry-ons when traveling by plane. Check the company's website for a list of the swabs (they come in two different fabrics) and compatability with the various fluids. If your sensor hasn't been cleaned in a year, you'll most likely want to start with Smear Away and then finish with a pass or two of VDust Plus.

Jody, I have the same camera, got it in January, and within the first two months I had a few dust spots that wouldn't go away with the blower. One spot in particular was big. I had good results on my original 5D with the dry Dust-Aid swabs, so I bought a new kit to try for the 5D2. Dust-Aid specifically states that they have formulated their products for the Flourine coating over the sensor guard on the 5D2. It worked except for that one big chunk, it just wouldn't budge off my sensor. So I sprung for the Dust-Aid wet cleaning kit, and that worked. It's been about 7 months now and I have no visible dust since that cleaning, the 5D2 sensor cleaner is handling it fine. Naturally I change lens VERY quickly and with the camera powered off of course. So there's a success story to ponder. I haven't used the kit that Cliff mentioned, but I imagine that it works well, it would not be as popular as it is if it didn't work, so research both. One thing that Dust-Aid has on their website is a video of the 5D2 cleaning process, worth watching through once or twice, regardless of what brand you choose.

From 5 days ago...
'5DMKII SENSOR CLEANING/SERVICE'

One other thing I should mention: in Lightroom, you can do Spot Removal on one image, then synchronize that with a batch of multiple images. This is a "Sync Settings" operation. The dust spots will be removed from all of the images that you synced to the first one.

ACR also allows you to sync the dust-spotting of any number of images. Problem is that if the images are different, what is a seamless repair of say, sky, in one photo can cause defects with non-sky detail in others. Always best to have the sensor as clean as possible.