Samsung S1050 date problem

I just had the first problem with my Samsung S1050 camera.

I noticed that some of the pictures I uploaded had funny dates on them, so I went into the camera to look at the date setup.

The page has three items: the date at the top, 08/05/08, then the time, then a setting to allow you to choose whether you want mm/dd/yy, yy/mm/dd, etc.

After flailing around with it, and actually calling Samsung and confusing the poor guy on the phone so much he dropped my call (on purpose? hmmm) I finally figured out what the problem is.

The date at the top of the screen, where you can set the camera date, is ALWAYS in yy/mm/dd format, no matter what it says elsewhere. I finally figured it out when I was trying to set the month and it started at 7 and went up to 50. That’s not days or months, so it has to be years. Similarly the second field goes from 1 to 12, and the third from 1 to 31.

Last month’s pictures came in as having been taken in 2007, which is because last month was month 7, and I thought I was entering the month because THAT’S WHAT THE CAMERA SAID I WAS ENTERING! Or so I thought.

I looked it up in the documentation, and there’s a reference to this in the section for initally configuring the camera. But not in the section for setting the date.

So what kind of a bug is this?

I guess officially it’s a documentation bug. It’s not a software bug, because it’s working as designed. IMO, it’s a design problem; specifically a user interface problem. The data entry fields are not labeled as to function. However, at the bottom of the screen, there’s a place to choose your date display format. I thought that this meant that the data entry fields must be arranged according to the way you’ve chosen to format your date displays.

I think I’ll see if Tog has seen this one.