I recommend using neither a DATETIME or a TIMESTAMP field. If you want to represent a specific day as a whole (like a birthday), then use a DATE type, but if you're being more specific than that, you're probably interested in recording an actual moment as opposed to a unit of time (day,week,month,year). Instead of using a DATETIME or TIMESTAMP, use a BIGINT, and simply store the number of milliseconds since the epoch (System.currentTimeMillis() if you're using Java). This has several advantages:You avoid vendor lock-in. Pretty much every database supports integers in the relatively similar fashion. Suppose you want to move to another database. Do you want to worry about the differences between MySQL's DATETIME values and how Oracle defines them? Even among different versions of MySQL, TIMESTAMPS have a different level of precision. It was only just recently that MySQL supported milliseconds in the timestamps.
No timezone issues. There's been some insightful comments on here on what happens with timezones with the different data types. But is this common knowledge, and will your co-workers all take the time to learn it? On the other hand, it's pretty hard to mess up changing a BigINT into a java.util.Date. Using a BIGINT causes a lot of issues with timezones to fall by the wayside.
No worries about ranges or precision. You don't have to worry about what being cut short by future date ranges (TIMESTAMP only goes to 2038).
Third-party tool integration. By using an integer, it's trivial for 3rd party tools (e.g. EclipseLink) to interface with the database. Not every third-party tool is going to have the same understanding of a "datetime" as MySQL does. Want to try and figure out in Hibernate whether you should use a java.sql.TimeStamp or java.util.Date object if you're using these custom data types? Using your base data types make's use with 3rd-party tools trivial.
This issue is closely related how you should store a money value (i.e. $1.99) in a database. Should you use a Decimal, or the database's Money type, or worst of all a Double? All 3 of these options are terrible, for many of the same reasons listed above. The solution is to store the value of money in cents using BIGINT, and then convert cents to dollars when you display the value to the user. The database's job is to store data, and NOT to intrepret that data. All these fancy data-types you see in databases(especially Oracle) add little, and start you down the road to vendor lock-in.