I met a repairman once who told me the blower bought him a boat for all the cameras he's dismantled when they blow crap on top of the focus screen, LCD, prism, etc. when he has to tear into them to get it out. He thought they were a godsend for his business as some people get a bit hyper in their use.
I bought some expensive butter-fly brush (A brush that spins to fling off stuff and build up some dirt attraction charge, or so they claim.) and found it streaks my sensor bad. I think the bristles pick up lube off the mirror box or shutter and then smear it. Some of the water-based sensor cleaners then turn it into a nice magenta streaky mess which needs a swab and Eclipse fluid to get rid of.
I doubt if you can beat the swabs. I put three drops of Eclipse on the ends, blot it quickly on a Pec-Pad tissue, and go at it. Then look at it under a 7x lighted loupe and see if stuff remains. I save the old swabs and flush them with Eclipse and blot and store them for later use if it wasn't a big mess of oil, just dust. I watched a shop clean a sensor once using some rubber-looking spatula and the girl wrapped the tip with a Pec-Pad. That's probably the cheapest way to go short of buying swabs (You may be able to unwrap some of them as they are tied with a small rubber band and cut the pec-Pads to fit too.).
I also made a small silicon hose that goes onto the end of the vacuum cleaner to suck out small shards of bayonet metal and whatever else is sometimes stuck in that flock paper. Seems it takes less cleaning by sucking out all that junk. No doubt some crud comes from manufacturing too. Those sticky-gel pens are really good to clean the flock paper of junk too. I never used them on the sensor as it spotted mine, so they were relegated to flock paper cleaning instead.
Some outfit around S.F. sells a lot of camera cleaning supplies. Micro-Tools or something like that.
SG
