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[Salviati]

8. While that is true, once the camera is unboxed, the date starts advancing.

With the unboxing, or battery replacement date as the default starting point. In my experience the default starting date is almost always substantially in the past, meaning if I don't reset the date, pictures will be time-stamped as being quite a bit in the past. To attribute this mismatch of dates to an unset clock in the camera requires that this camera must have been unboxed exactly 3 days after it's default date, which is probably sometime in 2003 when it was released, and had never had its clock set in the intervening 3.5 years.

My guess is that the default date is Jan 01 2003, the first day of the year it was released. Since the camera was first available in July, that would make this situation impossible. This doesn't discount the fact that the camera could have been set to the WRONG date, but I think that it's pretty unlikely that a camera that was not set up would give this date by coincidence.