So I finally get my Arctic Butterfly from Canada and attempt my first sensor cleaning.

I follow the instructions carefully -- I remove the protective top being careful not to touch the brush with my oily fingers, do the spin thing to charge up the static electricity, carefully keep the brush from touching any part of the mirror chamber, and begin to lightly stroke the sensor. So what do I see? With every touch of the brush I get a smear.

Looks like the damn thing arrived from Visible Dust contaminated.

Anyone else had this problem with this product or am I just one lucky dude?

If you are absolutely sure you didn't touch the chamber then there are two posabilities:

1. The dirt on the sensor is more 'grease' than dust and all you are doing is spreading it around with the AB. You will need to do a liquid clean, using either the green or orange swabs.

2. You got unlucky.

I found with the Canon 350D that I would also need to use orange swabs and liquid 8 times out of 10 as the dust spots were nearly always more than just dust. Coversely with the D200, using the same handling regieme I have not needed to clean the sensor once. It's purely anecdotal but it does seem to do better than my old 350D in this respect.

In either case you will want the cleaning solution for the AB.

Good luck.

I'm more on Greg's side, there must have been some grease deposits on your sensor and using the brush smeared the gunk, making the situation worse. I would clean the brush and wet clean the sensor using either Eclipse or Visible Dust fluid.

Just make sure that it really is a smear rather than just more dust. I say this because I got my own Arctic Butterfly not too long ago and tried using it to remove a couple of stubborn dust specs on my 5D sensor. The result looked horrible, and got worse each new time I tried, and I was convinced I had spread oil or grease over the sensor. I mean it looked really bad.

Eventually I realized that after each attempt the blotches were in a different place, so it was only dust I was moving around, and eventually I refined my technique to get the sensor completely clean. I don't know where all the dust was coming from but there was a lot of it.

I did check the sensor before using the Butterfly and did not see anything that looked like grease but I suppose a minute spec could be the cause. I have now wet cleaned the sensor.

Thanks to all for your input.

The first time I used a Sensor Brush I had smears too. After cleaning things up with a swab I was very carefull not to touch the area just beyond the sensor with the brush and I've not had the problem again. In my case it was operator error.