I checked several forums for you and the general suggestion is just live with it. Panasonic will charge you 330$ to clean the lens assembly and update the firmware and the problem will come back in 2 days. Then they will tell you they have to change the whole lens assembly $550. The problem will come back again. Twenty or more people said the best thing to do is just live with it as it does not interfere with the cameras performance in any way. It sounds to me like this problem is engineered into the camera to milk money from you. All of the users that have just ignored the warning are still working fine, They just say it's
annoying.One sent it to a shop to see if they could just disable the warning, You can not. After reading
every ones exact same problem I can feel comfortable recommending that you simply follow their course and
ignore the warning message. Everyone that sent it in was robbed and the problem came back within a month and ignoring it does no damage to the camera or the video it produces. If I were you I would send Panasonic a letter complaining about this issue and tell them what you know about their
scheme. Ask them why so many people are having this problem and they can not fix it. This is just another example of bad business practice. I see this more and more each day in all types of products. They figure you paid a lot for Your camera and you will pay a lot to fix it. Maybe if you make enough of a fuss and threaten to post this horror story to tech forums all over the internet they will send you a better camera. I did that with a Compaq Presario laptop I paid 700$ for. I had to send it in for warranty work 3 times in 6 months. When I threatened to post all my communications with them and my horror story HP Quality assurance sent me a 1400$ HP Pavillion fully loaded just to shut me up. HP bought out Compaq. Apparently these mega companies do not want their secrets out so they will pay you off to settle you issue if you ride them with honest complaints about their bad business practices. The last thing they want is people to realize what they are doing. I hope you found this information helpful. As there is no way to actually fix your problem yourself I hope you find this information I gave you valuable enough to rate it fixya for me. If you ride the company the way I instructed you you will get satisfactory results and in most cases better equipment out of them. And I will get the 6 bucks for telling you how to force them to help you. This is the absolute best answer anyone will be able to give you here. Others may try to tell you all crazy ways to disassemble the lens assembly and cleaning contacts. Doing so will ruin your camera that is not even broken and void whatever warranty you may have or your chances of getting them to replace it with better equipment. In any event, Let me know how you make out. If you need more help getting the company to help you you can send me an E-mail to
[email protected] and give me your number and all your info and I will ride them for you on your behalf as your qualified technician. I do this for a hobby so I will not charge you anything. I just hate seeing big companies taking advantage of their customers. Hope to hear from you soon,
George
