Wayne brings up a good point. It's entirely possible that the
dust-shaker doesn't actually do anything, but is purely
marketing hype. The dust-shaker membrane is slightly farther
away from the sensor than just the IR/AA filter. This would
defocus most dust.
The other thing I'm thinking that really is the big deal is
shutter design. If the shutter is only open during the exposure,
you're really only exposing the sensor to dust for fractions of
a second each time. If dust were to settle on the shutter
itself, it would get dislodged during the exposure and
potentially land on the sensor. Somewhere I read in some early
E-1 literature that they specifically designed the shutter to
not attract dust. I can imagine that some of the more notorious
dust-magnet cameras probably have some form of ungrounded blades
in the vertical shutter mechanism that are statically charged
through use. This would also explain why some specific cameras
within a brand/model are more problematic than others. If the
grounding/decharge characteristics of a camera are out-of-spec,
you'd have specs.
A friend and fellow wedding photographer in my town shoots
Nikons (D70, D100, D200) and two of his cameras attract so much
dust that he has to actually blow the sensors clean halfway
through a wedding. He showed me a sequence of pictures taken
over a period of one hour (no lens changes) where multiple blobs
started showing up. We're not talking 2-3 pixel specs, but huge
globbies. The D200 has been remarkably clean, so there is
definitely an issue with specific cameras and not technique or
lenses.
On the same point, another friend and wedding photographer in
the same town shoots Canon (20D, 1DmII). He has to clean the
20D a couple times a month, but the 1DmII he rarely needs to
touch at all.
Regardless of how my E-1 does it, I've been pleased. I've never
had to despot a single photograph from a paying job.
AG
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