if it's loose and wobbles around the pin would be broken. You should be able to tell which one it is simply by the feel of the switch. If your zoom is 2 seperate switches then one of the swiches is either faulty, the pin on the underside of the swich is broken or there is a foreign object stopping the switch from activating. What you'd have to do is remove the top of the switch and center the lever or piece of plastic and put the camera back together. So it will only push the lever in one direction. What sometime happens is the lever or plastic somehow gets on the wrong side of this slot. Push the switch the other way and it moves the lever or plastic in the opposite direction. Let it go and the switch centres itself taking the lever with it. On the underside of this switch would be a slot which when pushed one way pushes against a small lever of piece of plastic. I don't know what method your camera usues but most use a rocker type switch. If you can pull the camera apart (carefully) and find the zoom switch it could be that the switch itsekf has jumped the actuator. I don't know much about cameras, but it wasn't too hard. When reattaching the LCD ribbon cables, make sure the hinges are open, insert the cable, and snap down its latch. If it all works, then all you need to do is put it back together in the opposite order you took it apart. Even without the screen, you can try the zoom. Now insert the battery, and turn it on to see how it works. If it's something else, it's still probably a problem with this mechanism that you could fix.Īnyways, reattach the board to the top cover, and pop it back onto the camera. I wouldn't be surprised if your camera has this same problem. Then I put them both back in, popped the cover on (you may have to pry out one of the sides slightly to get it back on), and the lever works fine now. I took both the lever and the slider off, cleaned them, and got it so it would recenter easily again. If either of these fall, you may never find them again. The lever just sits on a peg, and has very small gears that move a slide bar. Mine didn't, so I had to pop the small silver cover off where the lever is with the flathead tip of the screwdriver. Now make sure that if you push it one way or the other that it will recenter on its own. You can use the tip of the screwdriver to pop it back to the center position. This was where the problem with mine was, the black lever was stuck over. On the top right side of the board, you'll see where the external zoom switch pushes a very small black lever. Now if you look at the bottom, there are two screws holding the board to the cover, remove these and you've got it apart. Now you should be able to pop off the top cover (with the zoom, power, etc). Remove these, and you should be able to remove the front (lift at the bottom and it pivots along the top edge).

There are three silver screws placed around the lens unit (look down inside, and you'll see them attaching it to the front panel). BOTH have hinges, not just the smaller one like other posts have said. Then unplug the two ribbon cables (the small one has a latch on top and the larger one has a black latch on the side that you need to lift).

Lift the back panel at the bottom edge, and it should pivot along the top edge until you can remove the back. Remove the battery and take out all the visible screws on the outside (2 on the right, 1 on the left, 3 on the bottom). Here's what I did with a $1.79 glass repair screwdriver. Since I could buy the same camera used at for that price I told them to send mine back and I'd take a shot at fixing it (since I was pretty sure it was a mechanical problem). I don't know a lot about cameras, so I sent it in to Panasonic (it was still under parts warranty), but was informed that due to 'grit substance' my warranty was voided and it would cost $179 to repair. If I switched it to review, it would just cycle through all the pictures, so I figured somewhere the zoom lever was stuck inside. When I turned it on, the camera would zoom out all the way and the other buttons wouldn't respond. If yours still zooms in all the way when you turn it on, then I had a similar problem with mine.

Izoom flashlights