Nikon D100 for Sale

Yep, that's my camera

It's old and was purchased on Sept 17, 2002 at Mike's Camera (Park Meadows store).

That means it has its share of dust spots. I recently used some manual blowers to move some of that dust out, but the rest needs to be physically removed. I don't have the tool to do that so, I'm not going to attempt any amateur innovations to remove the dust. I'd much more likely damage the IR filter. See the photos below to check out the dust.

The camera body is in perfect shape, or 99% of the way there. There are some minor scratches on the plastic cover that protects the rear LCD from getting scratched. That's about it for damage. But, you'll see that for yourself should you get really interested.

I have the original box and all the junk that comes inside that box, most importantly, the manuals (english and spanish) the charger and a battery. I also have a spare battery that will accompany the camera. The batteries have never given me any trouble but they are 4 years old so at some point they will need to be replaced.

The body serial number is: 2048848

I've decided to NOT include a lens. I thought the one I had was kind of cheap, but actually it is a pretty damn good lens. It's just light in weight compared to some of the pro lenses I have and I was misjudging it. It will still make a fine addition to my stable of nikon lenses.

Here is a link to the manual: http://elfurl.com/grwzo just look down the page for the D100 manual it's there someplace I promise. I'd upload it here but it's 15 megabytes so why duplicate such a large file.

So, here are some photos. In order to really see the problems with dust you need to download the full resolution versions of these photos. Click on the photo and the full size 3008x2000 will download. I had the camera set to take the maximum size photo (6 megapixels) with the lowest compression for JPG (best view). The camera can take TIFF files with NO compression and RAW which has no compression either. These photos, at least the ones of my neighbor's house, should provide some insight into just what a 6mp camera can do too. And finally, I would have dumped these into Photoshop and done some enhancement to brighten them up a little. The white clouds are having a slight dimming effect on the ground based objects. But, I wanted to send along pure camera photos with no adjustments (except for the dust spot revealers which are heavily manipulated to highlight those spots).

This photo was originally blue like the skies below, but I pushed it to the extremes to show off the dust spots. The next two photos are of my neighbor's home up hill from me. I believe they show off the dust spots as they typically appear in photos you take day to day. The last photo shows off the fact that several dust spots have been removed.

If you are interested enough to plop down the bucks to buy this camera used, or for that matter if you end up buying a new D50, then you need to get into real image editing. Photoshop Elements runs around $100 with no discounts. With that program you can easily fix the spots in all but the most difficult situations. And, in those really tough photos it can still be done, it's just that you'll need to spend some heavy time learning how to essentially paint pictures with the clone tool to remove the spots. Actually it's not so much learn as practice.

Back to normal exposure. This photo and the one below have not been touched by Photoshop other than to provide a smaller version suitable for display on these web pages.

Ok, this is the sensor after I blew some air at it for a few seconds. Surprisingly, quite a bit of dust was dislodged and removed. I couldn't push this picture as far as the first one above because of the white clouds. But if you drop this into an image editor (MS PAINT if you have nothing else) and zoom in you can still see the spots (or the lack of them, in the darker lower right portion of the photo.

if you decide you want to attempt to clean the spots then:

Tools:

An air blower of some kind, either a hand pump, or foot pump provides the least intrusive non-contact cleaning method. Ken Rockwell (below) suggests using a vac to suck the air out of a camera's sensor cavity. That sounds ok to me but you would definitely NOT want to let the suction hose clamp onto the front of the camera. The mirror assembly is delicate and could be damaged. I'd hold the hose with my fingers protruding over the opening so that they acted as spacers when I brought the hose to the camera. But, it's up to you.

Brushes to lightly lift out dust particles.

This site:

http://www.visibledust.com/index.php

 ... has a reputation for building the best gizmos. The brush you need to clean the sensor must be able to build and hold a sizable static charge. That is done by moving air by it at high speed. Visible Dust sells a brush that you "plug" into a spinner. It has a high speed motor that spins the brush. This has a two fold effect, it spreads out the brush by using centrifugal force to separate it, and while rotating at high speed the air blows old dust particles out and also builds the static charge needed to clean the sensor. When the brush is ready, you disconnect it from the spinner, and carefully reach into the camera and delicately draw the brush across the sensor hoping that the extremely minimal force of the brush filaments will dislodge any particles and the static charge will attract those particles to the brush thus removing them from the sensor and the cavity of the camera where they won't be hanging around to re-infest the sensor. But, the rub is, this tool is phenomenally expensive, well for what it is. It runs around $130.

You can also buy them from this place:

https://www.micro-tools.com/store/home.aspx

Micro-Tools has a selection of other stuff too.

Advice:

Best advice is to never touch the sensor, only approach it with compressed air or suction. And do NOT use a compressed gas source that has a propellant in it like a bottle of canned air. If a drop of the propellant gets on the sensor, it may stain it leaving a permanent mark.

So, you can absolutely never touch the sensor?

Touch One!

Well, there are two types of touching you can do to a sensor. You can use the brushes mentioned above. The practically don't come in contact. They are so soft you wouldn't believe it. So, the possibility of doing damage is very remote. But the problem with touching is ... are you introducing new dust via the brush, or removing old dust. If you are careful, keep the brushes protected in their cases in between uses and blow them out properly then it's a very good bet you will be cleaning not polluting the sensor.

Touch Two!!

Ok, this is the one where I draw the line. You have something that looks like a tiny plastic spatula. You cover it with some non-abrading material. You soak the material in a cleaning solution (actually just use the dispenser to force a drop or two onto the material). Then you actually gently press the material covered spatula against the sensor and drag it from one side to the other. The idea is that the cleaning solution will dislodge any really stuck on dust particles. The possibilities for real damage are significant here so I'm not going to be trying this option any time soon. I'd rather just Photoshop out a spot than a scratchy smudge.

But ... here are a couple of guys who make some suggestions from the relatively safe to the bold and dangerous..

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/cleaning.htm

http://www.bythom.com/cleaning.htm

http://www.cleaningdigitalcameras.com/