If you had a broken small Panasonic Lumix photo camera - where would you service it? My wife's Z56 no longer recognizes the battery. It's about 3-4 years old, so out of warranty. The issue is well documented on the internet, a battery smart chip to onboard computer communication issue.

I called Panasonic and they gave me the address to their factory service in Texas. This is a camera worth probably less than $100 now, but it took very good pictures for its size - wife loved it, so I would still try to fix it, but I'm afraid that shipping it back and forth plus the cost of repair makes it not economical...

What would you do? Try to fix it at a local shop or ship it to Pana?

Thanks,

Ship it back to Panasonic with a note saying the camera is "not fit for purpose", although I would splash out and buy the wife a new camera, she probably deserves it.