Haven't been posting a lot lately, way to busy with a lot of things, but I had to share this.

Back when Jen's mom came to visit she bought us a Pure Digital Flip Camera (PSV-351), and pretty much like everyone else who's tried one of these we really liked it a lot.

Flash forward a few weeks, and for some unknown reason the time on it got totally off. Instead of 7/2007 it thought it was suddenly 10/2011. I didn't think it was that much of a big deal at first, figured we could either:
1. Set it on the camcorder
2. plug it in and run a utility to set it
3. plut it in, and it would automatically sync with the computer's time.

The answer is D: none of the above. You can't set the time on the unit at all. Which begs the question; Who the fark thought that was a good idea? How stupid do you have to be to overlook something that basic and simple. In fact the only way to actually get the time set is to do the following:

From the Flip Video site:

The date and time on the camcorder are set to U.S. Central Time during manufacturing. You can reset the camcorders date and time by taking your camcorder to an authorized Pure Digital Retailer to get a DVD. When the camcorder is processed, its clock is reset to your local date and time. There is no other way for you to reset the date and time on your own.

Hey guys, here's an idea...maybe I don't want to pay for a freaking DVD just to get the time set. I mean call me a renegade but I'd think that it might have occurred to somebody over there pulling in a paycheck that this was a very very stupid idea. Hell, this isn't even about time zones, I could deal with the camera using EST, while it needs PST....but my camera seems to think it's magically 4 years and 3 months in the future. How in the hell did that happen? That's what is killing me, somehow the date changed cause the first few video's were fine, so how in heck did it go south like that suddenly?

As for their tech support group, they were nice enough, telling me they would fix it for me. The only caveat is that they wanted me to ship it out to them to CA.

Ship it....
Ship it to CA just to get the time set on it correctly?

What part of your brain has to be missing to make that seem like a logical course of action? Here's an idea guys, write a farking program and make it available on your site. Or if that's to hard, offer up a free DVD coupon so that I could take it and have it go through the full cycle of the machine which will probably sync the time....but asking me to ship it? Stop wasting my air you moron.

Update 9/3/07: I responded to their RMA request with asking them to just send me a coupon for a free DVD. They actually did, and today we tried it out. Sure the time is still 5 hours off, but at least the date/month is correct now. So short answer is if your date/time is off, having a dvd made will get you mostly fixed.