VCR Blues: Faulty time signals screw up user-friendly clock feature

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By MAY WONG Associated Press Writer SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Think you're going crazy because the clock on your VCR is never right? It may not be your fault.

A digital time stamp sent to televisions along with Fox Broadcasting's programming has been inserting West Coast time into video cassette recorders across the country, confusing an untold number of households for the past year, Fox spokesman Tom Tyrer acknowledged Friday.

Fox's Los Angeles network center turned off its time-stamp signal, which sets the clocks on VCRs fitted with an auto-time set feature, on Thursday after the San Jose Mercury News inquired about the mismatched times.

"We turned it off as soon as we found there was problem affecting our viewers, but we don't know how many viewers are affected," Tyrer said.

The problem may not be limited to Fox, which has broadcast the time signal to its 180 affiliate stations since last year. The Public Broadcasting System also sends out the time-setting signals.

In both cases, affiliate stations are supposed to adjust the signals to local times before relaying them to televisions and VCRs. For some reason, that wasn't happening at Fox, Tyrer said.

But even when stations do adjust the signals, there can be errors. The PBS affiliate in San Jose, KTEH, discovered this week that its time signal was 24 minutes fast. It has since corrected the problem.

"I thought I was in the twilight zone," said Ron Hare, a retired defense industry worker in Sunnyvale. The VCR he bought a year ago was 24 minutes fast when he first plugged it in, when he later moved it to the kitchen, and every time there was a power failure.

More than half of the 20 million VCRs that the electronics industry sells each year in the United States carry the feature, which gets rid of the blinking 12 o'clock that would otherwise appear on the display, said Ron Carolan, the director of home video marketing at Sony Corp.

Sony was one of the first to include the feature as standard equipment in all of its VCRs five years ago. It became widespread within the past three years after Sony provided a grant to PBS, which covers 80 percent of the United States, for equipment to broadcast the time signal.

"It was a little box that no one paid attention to" until the newspaper inquired about the faulty time, said KTEH's chief engineer, Carl Rieg.

Most VCRs, Carolan said, allow consumers to turn the auto-clock feature off and manually reset the time.

http://www.charlotte.com/click/wiretech/pub/vcr.htm

-- Doris (reaper1@mindspring.com), July 15, 2000


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