gvarner Loc: Central Oregon Coast

My policy, which is a separate personal property policy and not a rider with State Farm, says that they will replace if the repair exceeds 80% of the purchase value.

DebAnn Loc: Toronto

If you have a local and reputable camera repair shop, I would take it in for a diagnosis. They will tell you if it's worth repairing. I recently had a Canon lens repaired for a cost of $120 which is way less than the cost of a new lens.

John Ker Loc: North Hills, CA

I've been using Canon EF gear for around 30 years. I will occasionally get the ERR 01 notice on one of my many EOS cameras when the lens is not making good electrical contact with my camera bodies. When I get that error message, I clean both the lens contacts and the body contacts with the eraser on a new pencil. If the pencil is too old, the eraser gets hard and loses its effectiveness, so you might have to buy a new pack of pencils in a supermarket. I shoot with about ten different Canon EF lenses, including the Canon 28-70 f2.8 L series lens, which I bought 20 to 30 years ago, the lens that predates your 24-70 lens, and I've never had to replace or send any of my lenses in for repairs for the problem that you're mentioning. I have to remember to keep a pencil and eraser in my camera bag at all times so I can fix the problem if it comes up. If I forget to have an eraser with me, I'll lick my fingertip and rub the contacts with my finger, then rub the contacts clean with my lens cleaning cloth or my cotton shirt. I learned about cleaning the contacts of my cameras with a pencil eraser roughly 40 years ago from a Nikon repair facility where the repair man would start cleaning my Nikon battery contacts with a pencil eraser while I described the camera's problem. By the time I finished describing it, he had fixed the problem. He would hand the camera back to me—without charging me anything—and tell me that the camera was working fine, and it would be. After watching him do that a couple of different times, I started cleaning my camera's electrical contacts any time I got a problem. I now try to clean all of them before shooting a major event.