Well, I've been reading the posts about the black M-1, and I thought I'd share
a little experience with everyone.
I've had my Oly gear in storage for many years, whipping it out only very
occasionally for what I had hoped at these times would be exceptional photo
ops. In between these times, the camera bodies and all lenses were stored in
airtight plastic bags with silica gel dessicant. Every glass surface I can
see/inspect has remained flawless for the better part of fifteen years.
However, I also stored away a stack of 55mm filters, but *without* benefit of
plastic or dessicant. Upon extracting them from the depths of my storage area,
I noticed that tell-tale haze coating both surfaces of all the filters. (This
is a stack of twenty or so filters, probably worth around $700 CDN at today's
prices.) Well, according to many sources I've read, I had nothing to lose by
trying to clean them myself, since the alternative was to chuck 'em (with the
exception of those filters whose purpose was to degrade images in very selected
ways -- which the fungus merely enhanced -- such as the Tiffen Softnet filters
I'd used with my 100mm/2.0 Zuiko for portraits at friends' weddings). For
those of you who are squeamish about this sort of thing, hit your "Next" button
now.
Ready?
I used Windex glass cleaner and scratchy paper towels. (For those of you
unfamiliar with North American brands, "Windex" is a glass cleaner used around
the house for windows and such. It contains, amongst other things, small
amounts of ammonia.)
FABULOUS! I've never seen the filters cleaner or shinier, even though I
scrubbed 'em a bit, and all trace of the fungus was gone, gone, gone. I
"salvaged" hundreds of dollars worth of filters which I otherwise would have
simply thrown out.
Emboldened by this success, I next turned my Windex on to an old Vivitar zoom
which had a yucky-looking back element, one that I'd had no success cleaning
with the standard lens tissue/lens cleaner approach.
Same thing. Cleanest I'd ever seen that rear element (in fact, it went from
"cleaning marks on surface of element" to "flawless to the naked eye" in terms
of descriptive quality).
Would I recommend this approach all the time, such as periodic maintenance?
Heck, no. But for a last-ditch attempt to salvage something that you'd
otherwise give up on, it worked like a charm. It didn't appear to damage
coated or multi-coated surfaces at all -- quite the opposite, in fact.
I also found out that, unlike their lenses, Olympus' lens tissue is crap, to
put it mildly. The tissues I bought at a local camera store ($1.75 CDN -- no
big deal) were impregnated with some kind of compound which left a maddening
residue on the surface of glass, which could only be removed with the Windex.
I don't know who manufactures this stuff on behalf of Oly (or if they do it
themselves), but I have only one thing to say to them: "STOP IT!"
Garth
"A bad day doing photography is better
than a good day doing just about
anything else."
The Unofficial Olympus Web Photo Gallery at:
http://www.taiga.ca/~gallery/
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