if anybody can just let me kno about the procedure of cleaning the lense.I often get finger prints and dust on the front part of my lense.Does taht effect the quality of the picture.

-- Saurabh Bansal (sbansal74@hotmail.com), November 30, 2001

Answers

i have similar problems with lenses mainly due to dust. you can get some soft cloth from any camera shop to clean the lenses. doesn't matter if you find that small piece of cloth too expensive. it helps you to keep your more expensive lenses clean and get better pictures. if possible try to get a soft brush also. sometimes thats more useful than the cloth.

regarding the finger prints, it seems you are not careful while handling the lenses. prefer never to touch the glasses in the lenses. i don't see the need to do that. you can hold the lenses and/or filters on the sides and fix it on to the camera.

-- Sajeev (sajeev@phys-chemie.wuerzburg.de), November 30, 2001.

You are usually better off cleaning your lens as seldom as possible. It takes quite a bit of dust on the front of your lens to effect image quality. A finger smudge is different though.

Blow off any dirt before you rub it with a cloth. This will remove most of the abrasive particles before you start rubbing.

Soft cotton works, and a microfiber lens cleaning cloth is better. There are lens cleaning solutions but alcohol works as well. Usually it's best to wet the cloth instead of the lens, but there are misters that spray the solution right onto the lens. Make sure you don't use too much though.

A better way is to use a Skylight or UV filter left onto the front of the lens at all times. Then you are cleaning the cheap filter instead of your expensive lens. It will also serve to provide a modest amount of protection to your lens.

Even better is to use a rigid lens hood instead of the filter. It provides more damage protection and doesn't add another layer of glass to the lens.

-- Jim Strutz (j.strutz@gci.net), December 01, 2001.