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Should you clean your sensor? That depends on what kind of cleaning you plan to do, and whose advice you listen to. Some vendors countenance only dust-off cleaning, through the use of reasonably gentle blasts of air, while condemning more serious scrubbing with swabs and cleaning fluids. These same manufacturers sometimes offer the cleaning kits for the exact types of cleaning they recommended against, for sale in Japan only, where, apparently, your average photographer is more dexterous than those of us in the rest of the world. These kits are similar to those used by the vendor’s own repair staff to clean your sensor if you decide to send your camera in for a dust-up.

Removing dust from a sensor is similar in some ways to cleaning the optical glass of a fine lens. It’s usually a good idea to imagine that the exposed surfaces of a lens are made of a relatively soft kind of glass that’s easily scratched, which is not far from the truth (although various multicoatings tend to toughen them up quite a bit). At the same time, imagine that dust particles are tiny, rough-edged boulders that can scratch the glass if dragged carelessly across the dry surface.

Liquid lens cleaners can reduce this scratching by lubricating the glass as a lens cloth or paper is used to wipe off the dust, but can leave behind a film of residue that can accumulate and affect the lens’ coating in another fashion. Picture the lens wipes as potential havens for dust particles that can apply their own scratches to your lenses.

You can see why photographers who are serious about keeping their lenses new and bright tend to take preventive measures first to keep the glass clean. Those measures often include protective UV or skylight filters that can be cleaned more cavalierly and discarded if they become scratched. If all else fails, the experienced photographer will clean a lens’ optical glass carefully and with reverence.

Most of this applies to sensors, with a few differences. Sensors can be affected by dust particles that are much smaller than you might be able to spot visually on the surface of your lens. The filters that cover sensors tend to be fairly hard compared to optical glass. Cleaning a DSLR sensor that measures 24mm or less in one dimension within the tight confines behind the mirror can be trickier and require extra coordination. Finally, if your sensor’s filter becomes scratched through inept cleaning, you can’t simply remove it yourself and replace it with a new one.

In practice, there are three kinds of cleaning processes that can be used to vanquish dust and gunk from your dSLR’s sensor, all of which must be performed with the shutter locked open:

■ Air cleaning. This process involves squirting blasts of air inside your camera with the shutter locked open. This works well for dust that’s not clinging stubbornly to your sensor.

■ Brushing. A soft, very fine brush is passed across the surface of the sensor’s filter, dislodging mildly persistent dust particles and sweeping them off the imager.

■ Liquid cleaning. A soft swab dipped in a cleaning solution such as ethanol is used to wipe the sensor filter, removing more obstinate particles.