Is it possible to announce the revisions to the HDR1?

I have been barred from announcing the changes until the old inventory has been cycled through our dealers.

We struggled over this descision and determined that if we continue to promote the older version then people would be pleasently surprised to get the upgrade, but if we announced the update and they got the old they would be mad.

Bear with me. I will announce soon, likely the ned of the month.

The won't be able to tell imediately unless they had the previous version. The operation is quite different. But from a new clients perspective they won't know. The problem is if we posted the differences and they then got one of the old units. They would not have the functions they though they were getting and would know immediately.

I would be pissed if I found this info was held back from me.

For HDR-1 have you got an upgrade that will fix the clock to set itself?

My box and manual both say I can set clock for 24 hours or 12, and use and station with time signals to set the clock in "auto mode".

Even if this all works I would hope it would know when it lost time to go set itself.
Not clear if this should work too.

My radio seems to have no auto time set and also no 24 hour mode.

I'm very happy with the rest of the radio features and sound.

Well, the clock time is a little less obvious in the HDR-1, but it does exist. (And you didn't hear that from me).

As for the auto-clock, we had a long discussion with the factory, originally there was supposed to be the ability to set the time using the GPS encoding on the HD data packets so they were designing the HDR-1 to do so, but then were halted by some problems and they never removed the software that drove that feature.

And the 24 hour clock also was another feature they never removed but were supposed to.

Rest assured that I will be listing the changes soon. I just have to finish making sure that the inventory being sold today is the new version and not the old. I am pretty sure that I will be able to announce very soon.

There's is one way to solve this clock problem, is just build a WWVB 60 KHz reciever built in, that will recieve the digital pules signal.

This will help alot on getting the clock right on time and only thing is just ajust for your time zone.....

Hopes that's helps!!

7-16-07

We could do that, but then there are obvious other problems, cost being one of them. It is actually quite expensive to make a GOOD atomic receiver. Our atomic clock lines are quite pricey, but they are REAL atomic clocks. To add this function would increase price around $30 a unit.

How about a plug in option? Getting a clock that sets itself would be well worth $30 more to me, but that is because I have power glitches at least every week or two.

That would be nice, but here is the major problem we deal with. Although YOU would pay more, the average consumer still wants everything and doesn't wish to pay more than $20 to get it.

98% of radios sold in the market are at or below the $150 price point. If you can imagine what number of customers that leaves for all the over $150 radios in the market I am sure you can quickly assertain that it is hard to sell a good radio with all the features.

Or put differently, for every $20 difference in retail price we can expect to sell 2,000 less radios (example only). This means that we have to look very serioulsy about what changes we do make to a product.

I used to be a mechanic and I have to say that my experience wasn't much different there. A person would cuss a storm about a $250 repair to their car, but would be happy spending $250 for a TV. The car gets them to work and they don't want to invest to protect it, but a TV, sure! Same goes for alarm clocks. People rely on $20 clocks to wake them up and wonder why they are late.