7
I dropped $200 on a ultrasonic cleaner for lenses and it was a total bust
Everyone kept telling me an ultrasonic cleaner was the gold standard for getting fungus off lenses. I bought a 2L one from Amazon for about $200 thinking it would solve all my problems. After three tries with different solutions and timings, it barely touched the haze on a vintage 50mm f1.4 I was working on. Ended up just manually polishing the elements with some ammonia and it came out way cleaner in 15 minutes. Has anyone else had better luck with these things, or am I just using it wrong?
2 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In2 Comments
david_jones386h ago
Oh man, that's frustrating. I dropped way too much on a similar thing for my camera lenses too, and honestly I've noticed this pattern with a lot of hobby gear. People hype up these expensive solutions, but the simple old-school methods work better most of the time. It's like everyone thinks you need some fancy gadget to do a job right, when really a little elbow grease and the right basic chemical (ammonia in your case) gets it done faster. I've seen it with car detailing too - guys spend hundreds on foam cannons and special sprays, but a bucket of soap and a microfiber towel beats it every time for a deep clean. The problem is these ultrasonic cleaners are made for jewelry and small parts, not delicate lens coatings, so they either do nothing or wreck stuff (guess which one they do). Good on you for figuring out the manual polish, that's the real pro move.
8
robin5915h ago
Three ultrasonic cleaners and a lot of regret later, I finally figured out that my grandmother's old trick of a soft toothbrush and a dab of dish soap worked better than anything fancy. Your point about car detailing hits close to home - I spent a whole weekend polishing my truck with a $300 DA polisher and special compound, only to get a better finish from a $5 bottle of Meguiar's and some elbow grease on the hood. The lens coating thing is real too, I accidentally stripped a vintage 50mm f/1.4 of its coating with one of those cleaners, and that was a painful lesson in trusting the hype over common sense.
3