VSGO Electronic Air Blower Review

I get a fair amount of review requests from various companies around the world. Some stuff I am happy to look at, some stuff is too obscure. This review is of a product that is arguably too obscure for me to review… despite that, the following is a review of the VSGO Electronic Air Blower.

What on earth, you might ask, is the VSGO Electronic Air Blower? The short answer is that it’s the most expensive, overly luxurious version of one of those camera cleaning air blowers that I could ever possibly imagine. You know the things, a little pointy tube with a bulb on the end that you squeeze to blow a jet of air out of… this is like that, but is a USB rechargeable electronic with a fan blade that spins very fast blowing air through a tube that also comes with a optional nozzle, brush, has power settings and even a torch on it!

You might wonder why I said yes to reviewing such a product. The answer is simple really. As a photographer, I find dust to be an issue in a fairly wide verity of areas of what I do. I don’t live in some sort of specialist laboratory. I have a dog, and cats and birds and children all living in my house. We keep a tight ship when it comes to cleaning, but there’s no escaping from dust.

Dust is an issue to me when it settles on my camera equipment. I keep it in a cupboard, but it still gets in the and sits on stuff. I clean it off to use the kit, but I also find myself photographing my cameras a fair bit for this blog and social media too, and I definitely don’t like them looking dusty in photos. It’s a problem when I do product photography at work for exactly the same reason. I also digitise my own film sometimes and find issue with dust on film. And when packing pixl-latrs we also have an issue with dust – no one wants to receive a product for digitising their own film that’s covered in dust out of the box. And then, there’s the issue of sensor dust. I’ve been shooting more digital recently and having shot an entire holiday’s worth of photos with my M10-P with a dusty sensor, I remembered just how irritating that problem can be.

Effectiveness

So, how much of this does the VSGO Electronic Air Blower actually solve? For $99 (~£80 today) is it the perfect dust-busting solution? Well, when I first received it, I was quite unimpressed with how powerful the blower was. Though I should quickly add that when I showed it to my wife, she was really impressed with how powerful it was, so I think I’d probably set my expectations too high. I also hadn’t tried it with the nozzle which definitely helps direct a stronger funnel of air.

Additionally, to begin with I made the mistake of assuming that the blower alone was the main feature and just started pointing it at things expecting all the dust on said thing to blow away revealing a perfectly clean surface. Not the case. Dust is stickier than you might think…

So it’s useless then? No, not at all. In fact, the key to its success is not just in the blower, it’s in the brush that mounts to the front of the blower. It’s the combination of the brush that helps dislodge the dust from the surface and the air blower that blows it away. Believe it or not, I’ve actually ended up testing this theory in quite a few different circumstances too, and despite initial reservations, I’ve been impressed. I actually sell cleaning brushes and blowers as accessories for pixl-latr, and use the ones I sell on there a fair bit, so I also have a point of reference for comparison too.

The issue with brushes alone, even the good quality anti-static ones I sell is that you can find yourself chasing the dust around the surface. Especially in nooks and crannies such as the edge of the pixl-latr frame (or any film holder for that matter). This is also an issue on the front of lenses where swiping at the dust can sometimes just push it into the corners of the element where it meets the retaining edge. I also find that getting dust out of knurled surfaces can be a problem as well as parts of cameras where components such as shutter dials come close to the edge of another body part of a camera. The VSGO Electronic Air Blower with its brush definitely makes a difference in all these situations.

Slightly fringe use case for those reading this, but if you ever find yourself packing pixl-latrs, it definitely helps with make sure they’re as presentable as possible too. In fact, I even tried using it on a few other surfaces. It removed the dust off some of the parts of my car dashboard I couldn’t get to with the hover when I was giving it a deep clean the other day. I’ve also found it effective at blowing dust off my records. I set them spinning on the turntable then starting from the centre hold the brush against the surface of the record with the blowing blowing gradually moving it toward the edge of the record. It even removed some dust hanging off my stylus. The soft brush is delegate enough for me to risk touching the stylus without much worry.

One thing it didn’t work so well at was blowing the dust out of the nooks and crannies of my daughter’s big clicky-key keyboard – the brush is too soft. It also didn’t do very well on the engrained muck of some of my older cameras, but honestly they probably need some chemicals and a scrubbing brush, so that’s probably fair enough.

One thing I haven’t braved yet is attaching the little filter to the back and using it to blow the dust off a sensor. Maybe I’ll wait until I get dust on one of my lesser digital camera sensors to try that though…

Build Quality

It’s fair to say, that the VSGO Electronic Air Blower is indeed a high quality feeling product. It has a metal skin which adds to the overall build quality which in general feels very high. There are plastic parts such as the mount for the brush, but even that feels solid and has a nice tolerance in terms of its fit to the body of the blower. There’s front, back and base faces are also covered in a nice black rubbery material which has a quality feel. Somewhat inexplicably, the battery pack separates from the fan part. I wonder if it is designed to fit to other small electronic tools…?

I do have some quibbles with the design though. For a start, it’s really hard to turn on. There’s a button on the bottom that you have to press really hard to switch the power on. Once on, you have to press and hold the trigger button for it to run. This isn’t an issue, but it does power off by itself quite quickly meaning I have found myself having to wrestle with the annoyingly difficult to switch on button more than I’d like.

It also has three speeds which are cycled through via the hard to press power button. There’s 3 LEDs on the front that indicate which power it is running at. The lower speeds seem redundant to me. I’ve only even used it on the high speed.

It has an LED torch that I guess is designed for inspecting the inside of a camera for eg. Useful, but it’s on the bottom of the battery pack, not where you might expect it to be under the blower so you can light up what you’re removing dust from as you’re doing it.

Finally, it’s charged via a USB socket on the bottom. The battery seems to last ages too. Possibly a product of how readily it powers itself down between uses.

Final thoughts

So there you have it, a review of an electronic air blower… … not the most thrilling photography accessory I’ve ever written about, but write about it I have nonetheless! There was just enough use cases for me to want to give this thing ago, and but for sensor cleaning which I haven’t tried yet – and once I realised it needed the nozzle and brush to work its best – it’s been pretty impressive in its performance!

I suppose the elephant in the room is the price tag. I charge £20 for the equivalent sized Staticwisk which probably sounds like quite a lot to some people for just a brush. I guess in the context of that price point adding a high powered blower to the brush for an extra £60 isn’t that much more money. Yet, £80 just seems like a big number for something for just removing dust off things. That being said, now I’ve tried the VSGO Electronic Air Blower Review, I don’t want to give it up. I have genuinely found it very useful – it just takes all the effort out of removing dust from pretty much all of the things I have tried to remove dust from. I guess, ultimately, it’s a luxury product, that has now spoiled me a little…

You can find out more, and get yours from Pergear here, or Amazon here
(These are not affiliate links. This blower was loaned to me for review)

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