Hi, I’m wondering if anyone has any advice for, or experience with this issue. I appreciate any thoughts or info, thank you in advance! :) 

The camera is the Panasonic LUMIX DMC TZ80, 30x optical zoom. I included a link to the specs as well. 

I have had this camera for a while and it has performed without any issues for a long time - but for a fairly long time now the issue I started experiencing is that when taking photos, especially on/around full zoom, I can see a shadow ring. The closest way to describe it is that it’s shaped like a vignette effect. It’s sometimes worse than others and it always jiggles with movement of the camera. Sometimes it’s covering more of the view than other times, e.g. sometimes there might just be a small non effected circle in the middle, like if you expanded a vignette effect a bunch, or other times it’s not as expanded. The shadow specifically is not visible on the actual pictures afterwards but it is seen at all other times when taking images, including while the shutter button is half pressed down. The shadow ring shows up whether I am looking through the LCD screen or viewfinder to take pictures. The big issue is that it has significantly reduced the performance of my camera and the quality of pictures. It really struggles to focus now (whether I’m using AF or MF) and even if it does “focus” on auto focus mode for example, majority of the time the pictures still look out of focus and the sharpness, clarity, and contrast etc. in my images has decreased so much since this issue. 

I am assuming this is because something is physically loose or misaligned, but are there any ways to fix this on a camera like this? 

My zoom lever also doesn’t work very well and I’m not sure if that’s also maybe from whatever is causing the shadow issue. A few times I’ve accidentally bumped the on button when putting my camera back in its case and that’s obviously caused the lens to try expand while it’s getting stopped and pushed back by the case. This has never jammed the lens from being able to expand or retract afterwards but I’m thinking maybe that’s still done some type of damage to end up causing this shadow ring and zoom lever issue. Although it’s probably still important to note that these two issues didn’t show up together at the same time or right after those incidents - the issues showed up randomly many uses after any of the times that had happened. The zoom lever also wasn’t working very well for a while before the shadow ring issue popped up. 

Thank you for reading, let me know if there are any further details I should gather to add into the post. :) 



Shadow ring (kind of looks like a vignette effect) showing up on LUMIX DMC Tz80 compact digital camera