Thirty years of cleaning fungus the same way, one quote made me stop

I always used alcohol on fungus lenses until a customer handed me a 1980s Pentax lens and asked 'does that eat the coating off?' I tested it on a spare element that same night and sure enough, the coating was coming up in streaks. Anyone else have a go-to method that turned out to be doing damage the whole time?

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emery87915d ago

That coating stripping thing hit me hard too. I spent years using isopropyl on everything without a second thought. Once I saw what it did to a test element, I started checking every cleaner on cheap donor glass first. Now I keep a little jar of broken elements and junk lenses just for testing. Makes me wonder how many nice copies I ruined back in the day without knowing it. And yeah, the internet is full of people swearing by alcohol, but most of them never actually looked at the coating under a loupe after.