To Clean or Not to Clean???

[sunwrites]

Hi,

I'd be grateful if someone could help me with advice. I own a Canon S5-IS bought 18 months ago along with the standard lens. I've taken it to beaches many times. It's still working quite nicely. However I sometimes find it difficult to focus on even well-contrasted objects and I often fail to find the crystal clarity and rich colours in my pictures that I find in others' works. There's often a sort of fuzziness in the edges of objects and a barely-perceptible dullness in the hues.

Considering my camera has often been out in a sandy environment, including one unfortunate afternoon on a beach when it was inadvertantly exposed for a couple of hours to sand blowing in the wind (I had to keep wiping off the tiny grains stuck to the device for days afterwards), would a cleaning/servicing job improve the results? Mind well, I've never opened the lens till date but could some sand have still gotten inside the device and onto the image sensor although nothing seems to be seriously wrong with my camera?

[OsmosisStudios]

Likely wont change anything. Is there anything you can show us to show the differences?