12-21-2011, 09:16 AM
[quote name='Brightcolours' timestamp='1324456987' post='13965']
lens cleaning fluid is a fancy glass cleaning fluid with ingredients that all evaporate and dissolves grease, Nothing aggressive in there.
You can not harm lens coatings easily, they are metals evaporated on the glass under high temperatures. They are hard and durable.
I have a tiny Zeiss lens cleaning fluid spray that I use for 5 years now, and it will suffice for years to come. You use such a tiny amount per time (I clean several lenses in one go with a tiny amount of spray on a corner of the cloth) that thinking of using water makes little sense, Distilled water does not dissolve greasy finger smudges that easily, so I can't recommend that idea over lens cleaning fluid.
I never used a "lens pen", and I can't see it have an advantage over my standard brush and/or cloth method, which takes seconds.
[/quote]
I don't know if the coating of a lens is easy to harm. I used to clean my 24-85mm f2.8-4 basically following the correct steps. However, after the cleaning I found that near the boundary of the glass the caoting got two tiny "white spots". I wonder if the coating has been damaged by the cleaning process. That made me to think that probably the coating of the 24-85mm is too weak, but I never know if my thought was correct and I even didn't know if that was really a coating damage. After that cleaning I put a UV on the lens and never checked it again. Since that I also became nervous in lens cleaning and put a UV to every my lens except the 50mm f1.8D.
Frank
lens cleaning fluid is a fancy glass cleaning fluid with ingredients that all evaporate and dissolves grease, Nothing aggressive in there.
You can not harm lens coatings easily, they are metals evaporated on the glass under high temperatures. They are hard and durable.
I have a tiny Zeiss lens cleaning fluid spray that I use for 5 years now, and it will suffice for years to come. You use such a tiny amount per time (I clean several lenses in one go with a tiny amount of spray on a corner of the cloth) that thinking of using water makes little sense, Distilled water does not dissolve greasy finger smudges that easily, so I can't recommend that idea over lens cleaning fluid.
I never used a "lens pen", and I can't see it have an advantage over my standard brush and/or cloth method, which takes seconds.
[/quote]
I don't know if the coating of a lens is easy to harm. I used to clean my 24-85mm f2.8-4 basically following the correct steps. However, after the cleaning I found that near the boundary of the glass the caoting got two tiny "white spots". I wonder if the coating has been damaged by the cleaning process. That made me to think that probably the coating of the 24-85mm is too weak, but I never know if my thought was correct and I even didn't know if that was really a coating damage. After that cleaning I put a UV on the lens and never checked it again. Since that I also became nervous in lens cleaning and put a UV to every my lens except the 50mm f1.8D.
Frank