Cleaning the Canon 17-55mm f2.8 IS USM of dust

For those of you who have 17-55's I bet most of you have noticed that you keep getting more and more dust inside the lens. You have probably noticed that it does not affect your image quality....But it probably bugs the heck out of you. Will the dust get so bad that it will affect the image?

I did not wait to find out. I looked around the internet and found several sources of people who cleaned and documented how they cleaned the inside of their lens.

So I wrote a little blog on it.

http://www.bobkeenanph​oto.com …lens-and-then-sealing-it/

Some people posted that they were going to put some silicone glue on the slots under the label to see if it would keep the dust out. But I could not find any posts of the results of that experiment.

Well.... I did it. And it did stop the dust or at least slowed it down to what a normal lens would be.

So if you feel courageous (or stupid) and you hate dust....give it a try.

Bob, you might want to reconsider the silicone seal.

The problem is that the 17-55 extends when it zooms. By my calculations, zooming from 17 to 55 mm draws in about 90 cubic centimeters of air from the outside. This is necessary, since if it were sealed you'd draw a vacuum in zooming and the lens would be hard to zoom and would also creep back in because of the vacuum in the lens.

Of course, every time you zoom you draw in dust with that 90 cc of air.

If it can't get in past the front, it'll get in from the back or the joints in the barrel.

The plastic ring on my 17-55 is a close fit and I don't think much if any air can get past it anyway. I think the primary source of air when zooming is from inside the camera.

-js

Here is another dust removal procedure written by an old Pro around here:

http://www.pbase.com/l​ightrules/drp

Regards,