For cleaning film holders, I like a painter's tack rag - the beeswax impregnated cheesecloths. Vacuums sound nice, but the exhaust is - an air blower which raises dust. And hopefully there's more dust in your environment for the vacuum exhaust to raise than in the film holders!
There are no perfect cloths!
BTZS hoods are nice - I have a couple and like them for car and cool weather use. But they're almost impossible when you stick your sweaty head into one. Glasses, ground glass, everything fogs up immediately. A black T-shirt works pretty well, as does home-made.
Ebony makes a cloth that is the best but has drawbacks, especially with cameras with no cold shoe. This hood is a compendium and camera shelter, you can shoot in light rain with it. But it requires a cold shoe, the Ebony lens shade clip, and the Ebony GG protector, and you can't use it without the clip and protector. And all this is pricey.
They also make a very light cloth that isn't expensive, but it is small, 4x5 and maybe 5x7 only. It's very, very light and that's great when you're carrying it, less so when it's windy.
I like my old Gnass cloth as well as any - not too light or too heavy, provides some padding to help hold everything in place in the pack, and something very similar could be easily made.
So... If you only have one, a black T-shirt or a home made cloth. If you have the luxury of two, a BTZS for non-sweaty situations, and then a home made cloth for everything else. If you know you're going to have to shoot in adverse conditions, the Ebony cloth is hard to beat even if you add a cold shoe.
The ideal cloth, assuming that you're willing to attach a cold shoe to the front standard, would be a home-made cloth, soft and relatively thick like the Gnass, maybe just a inch or three larger, with a pocket for a piece of rigid plastic or light wood to function like the Ebony GG protector. Then you could use it with the Ebony lens shade clip, which is handy to flag the lens anyway, or you could use it just like a regular cloth - something you can't do with the big Ebony cloth because of the built-in "stiffeners" (hard to explain, trust me).
Cheers, Steve
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