Regrettably, I am posting about a yet unresolved situation with Polaroid. A few weeks before Christmas last year, my mother-in-law purchased a Polaroid A500 digital camera. It’s a fairly nice, compact little digital camera and was rather inexpensive at the time. For about six months, it held up pretty well.

However, recently, the camera seems to have lost its mind. Every single time you turn on the camera, the date and time have reset themselves to 10/01/2003 12:00:00 a.m., and the camera prompts you to fix it. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the camera won’t actually let you change it from that screen. You have to exit that screen, then go back to the main menu, then choose to change the date and time.

I searched the Internet quite a bit and found a lot of people experiencing the same problem with the camera. Unfortunately, however, I was not able to find a solution to the problem.

Therefore, I contacted Polaroid customer support through its Web site on Dec. 17. I got no response other than the auto response that says something like “We received your query and will respond as soon as possible”. After hearing nothing for over ten days, I decided to “update” my query yesterday. I have still got no response from Polaroid customer support.

I tried multiple times to call their customer support hotline, but I always get a busy signal during their relatively short business hours (I think they’re open for six hours on weekdays and 4 hours on Saturdays; closed on Sundays).

I understand that we had a holiday in between, but I still would have expected some sort of response. The most frustrating part of it is the fact that it seems to be an extremely common problem and no one seems to have posted any sort of permanent solution. I’m almost certain that it’s just a matter of replacing some sort of internal battery, but I’m not sure whether that’s something I can do myself, or if we’ll have to send it off to a Polaroid service center.

I am extremely frustrated with Polaroid’s customer support as of yet. Unfortunately, after searching the Internet for some feedback about its customer support, I have also found a lot of other negative reviews.

My recommendation: If you ever plan to purchase a Polaroid product, you should do so with the full understanding that you will have to do all troubleshooting on your own. Do not expect any serious assistance (if any at all) from the Polaroid customer support.

I would honestly recommend that you not even purchase Polaroid products, since you never know what sort of problems you might run into. I read one horror story about a consumer that purchased a Polaroid product that only worked for about three or four weeks. They then, after much tribulation, sent the unit to Polaroid for repairs. A few weeks later, they got the “repaired” unit back, which worked for another couple weeks and then failed again. Then, after much more trouble, sent the unit to Polaroid once again for repairs. At the time of the consumer’s post, the unit had been at Polaroid for almost six months, and the consumer couldn’t get any response whatsoever from Polaroid, nor could they get the unit back in order to try to return it to the retailer from which they’d purchased it.

If I ever hear from Polaroid, I will update you. I am not holding my breath, however.