What are the current "best practices" for sensor cleaning? I first started (on a 10D) with a Sensor Swipe, Pec Pads, and Eclipse fluid. Nerve-wracking, eventually got most spots, but tended to leave smears in the corners. A bulb blower usually makes things much worse--probably kicking dust out of the entire chamber. Several years ago I bought the first Arctic Butterfly from Visible Dust. An extremely poor design: can't leave the batteries installed because something always presses the button & the brush runs merrily away in my bag. Butterfly plastic case comes open in my bag, letting the brush get dirty (so I tape it shut). When I operate the motor to charge/clean the brush, the brush flies off about every fifth operation if I don't remember to re-seat the press-fit base into the motor assembly. All that said, multiple operations of the Butterfly usually did reduce the number of spots. Their later models might be better, but I don't feel like rewarding their original crappy design with a new purchase, especially at their prices! Now I read about 7x magnifiers to let me look at the dust on the sensor--but that doesn't seem like enough magnification to see small spots, & how do I clean them any better than I've done in the past even if I can see them? My 1Ds MkII and 5D both have spots and smears whenever I shoot test frames of a white card at f22, and all these methods seem as likely to make it worse as to improve things. I have NEVER been able to eliminate all dust spots from test frames. Admittedly, I don't usually need to spend more than a minute or two with PS tools to remove spots from skies & rarely see spots elsewhere in an image, but I'd like to eliminate that.
And, please don't tell me to buy a 1Ds MkIII with its built-in sensor cleaning; from what I read on this and other sites, it doesn't work. I'd like to hear what photographers who have been through the sensor-cleaning battles feel is the best solution here in spring 2008.