Rehouse for Canon EF 24-70 2.8 USM?

[Zack Birlew]

Hey, everybody, so I stumbled upon a good deal on the Canon EF 24-70 2.8 USM I, not II, and it has a busted zoom mechanism and bad chip cable that needs to be replaced, however, as a manual zoom on a dumb EF adapter for my Sony camera it does pretty good. I had a thought though versus buying a new one or saving this as spare glass, as it is mint, does any company currently rehouse Canon EF zooms? The EF 24-70 2.8 USM I and II seem like great candidates as they are made of plastic and seem to break down over time because of that despite their great glass and if given the proper metal rehousing treatment they would be pretty killer cine zooms and it gives some great modern lenses a potential extended life and usefulness. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated and, if nothing else, does anybody know a good third-party repair place that might be able to get my lens back up to shape since Canon doesn't service it anymore?

 

[Martin Konrad]

To my knowledge there is only a cheap “rehousing” Cinematics offer on eBay and Amazon… it looks like a new plastic shell will 0.8 gears.

It must be quite difficult to make a 24-70 for film use, manual, parfocal and with limited breathing

Pegasus announced a rehousing of the Nikon 24-70 in 2019, but I cannot find anything after the initial press release.

And why has Sigma, who have a full Cine set and a very good 24-70 in the photo department never released one?

If you don’t need FF I can highly recommend the Tokina Cine 25-75, the minimum focus cannot go as close as the Canon 24-70 and it only covers S35 (a bit more, covers full Gemini) and it’s cheaper than a real rehousing

 

[Zack Birlew]

It’s not about needing a particular zoom per se, I have plenty of lenses and I’ve made sure zoom options are well covered, if a bit to the hoarder level lol! I know the Canon EF 24-70 2.8 is highly regarded and I happened to get a steal on an optically mint one even if it needs to get repaired for a few hundred dollars and I just thought that it would be better, in my case, to put those few hundred bucks towards getting it Cine rehoused by somebody but I guess it’s still too early as I haven’t found a company yet that will do it.

By the way, the Pegasus company must have gone out as the links to their Facebook page weren’t working and I did find one mention of a Japanese company that might have a solution, it’s called Technical Farm, but I’m not sure if they do a full rehousing or a mod and the price is around $3500 so I need to email them and research further. In the meantime I may just leave it until somebody picks up the ball on the rehousing front, the glass is mint and it kind of works when used on a dumb mount so there’s not too much rush. Hopefully somebody comes up with something or someone comes through from the emails I’ve sent.

 

[Zack Birlew]

Update: The Technical Farm place never got back to me so that's a dead end too. However, I did find some repair services on eBay that say they can fix my lens but they're in Canada so that's going to be a job for another day.

The thing is, I watched a review video by Christopher Frost today on the Canon EF 200mm 1.8 and clearly there's some great legacy EF glass that is in need of manual cine rehousing! At the very least, the article on Technical Farm showed that this can be done, even if it's just a mod, and with mirrorless cameras being the norm there's no excuse about PL adaptation issues either, just go LPL or other mirrorless mount.