A guy at a camera swap meet changed my view on ultrasonic cleaning

I was dead set against ultrasonic cleaners for lens elements, thought they'd wreck coatings for sure. Then I talked to this old repair guy in Portland who showed me his setup with a $60 cleaner from Harbor Freight. He ran a beat-up 50mm f/1.4 through it for 3 minutes at 40°C and the thing came out spotless with zero damage. He said the trick is using distilled water and a drop of dish soap, not those harsh chemicals. Has anyone else had good luck with a cheap ultrasonic on vintage glass?

2 comments

2 Comments

nancy47524d ago

@riley_schmidt beat me to saying all this but yeah, I think people just hear "ultrasonic" and freak out without actually trying it... I bought a little cheapo one off eBay for like 30 bucks and my first test was a lens I already had written off with fungus. Came out looking like new and I'm still shocked. Half the horror stories online are probably from people who ran a lens for 20 minutes in some acid bath.

riley_schmidt24d ago

Distilled water and a drop of dish soap" is exactly what I've been doing for two years now. I grabbed a $50 ultrasonic off Amazon, nothing special, and I've run dozens of vintage lenses through it. Old Nikkors, a beat up Takumar, even a Soviet Jupiter-9 with haze so bad I thought it was a goner. Three minutes at 40C with distilled water and a tiny squirt of Dawn, and they all came out clean. The trick is not going longer than 3-4 minutes and keeping the water temp low. I was skeptical too because everyone says ultrasonics kill coatings, but that's usually from people using harsh chemicals or running them too long. Cheap cleaners work fine if you're careful.