Nikon D4 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/500 sec, f/8, ISO 1250 — image data
A Watch
a cheap watch, but serviceable
As I mentioned in the comments on last month's post about horrid watch-marketing copy, I've been looking for a nice watch with a combination of features and simplicity and size that no one seems to make. So after years of keeping my eye out, I finally decided that “perfect is the enemy of good enough” and went ahead and bought some cheap watches just to try.
I'm glad I did because I found out some new ways in which what you see in advertisements is not necessarily what you get, and I also found that what I though was important in theory wasn't always important in practice.
The first watch I tried:
Fossil Men's Chronograph Townsman Navy
$110 at Amazon.com
This was a huge compromise from what I wanted in that it's casual and has stopwatch fluff, but I liked the deep blue face, and with the bright hands it seems to be eminently readable. So many watches these days, whether cheap crap or an $85,000 Patek Philippe, don't seem to have basic look-at-a-glance legibility. If you can't read it, what's the point? (I guess the point of wearing an $85,000 Patek Philippe that you can't read is to advertise that you can afford to wear an $85,000 Patek Philippe that you can't read.)
Unfortunately, this Fossil Townsman was horrible.
The hands, which look bright in the photo, are actually dark metal with a mirror finish. If they reflect something bright then you see them as bright. Otherwise, they disappear into the black of the face (which indeed looked black, even in direct sun, and not the dark navy blue described by Amazon's prose and photos). So I couldn't read the time on the thing except in good circumstances. It was frustrating, so I returned it.
I did the same with the $125 light-cream colored version of the same watch that I'd bought at the same time, for the same reasons.
Running out of time to enjoy Amazon-US prices and selection before returning to Kyoto, I tried two more watches, and ended up keeping them.
The first is a $165 Stührling Original Symphony Eternity GMT...
Nikon D4 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — 1/500 sec, f/8, ISO 4500 — image data
Stührling Original Symphony Eternity GMT
This too is a great compromise over what I sort of think I want in a watch, but for $165 I can give it a try.
The good:
- Easily readable across a wide range of lighting conditions, including dim.
- The face is not too small (42mm) and the case not too thick (13mm).
- Automatic: it has no batteries to need changing, and winds itself.
- A fairly simple, uncluttered face. (Photos make it look more busy than it really seems.)
- Has a name with an umlaüt. Makes it look old-world classy. Ümlaut means class, you know.
- Safe to swim with, so safe in the rain.
The bad:
- I wish it was a bit bigger, much thinner, and had a cleaner design around the outside edge.
- Such a low price for an automatic (self-winding) watch brings worry about quality.
- The date and GMT boxes are too small/difficult to read even with glasses. I didn't even bother setting them.
- Luminescent features (hands and dots around the face) are worthless. Fireflys are an order of magnitude brighter.
The “GMT box” is supposed to show the hour in some other timezone, which could indeed be quite useful for me living in Japan, but I knew before I bought it that the box would be too small to read without glasses, so I'd not be able to rely on it. Indeed, I can't read it even with glasses unless the lighting is really good.
I can read it in this photo I took for this post, though:
The face looks a bit busy with the wavy pattern, but in practice it just seems like a mild background texture.
It's advertised as water resistant to 50m (165 feet), which makes me feel I should be able to wear while swimming as deep as I could ever swim, but the manual says “shallow water”. This is apparently a well-established racket of inflated ratings used across the watch industry. Water resistant to “10 meters” makes you think it's okay to shower or swim? Nope. The manual says such a rating means "withstand splashes of water while washing the hand, but should not be worn while swimming".
Once you learn the code you can understand what you're getting, but until then it seems wildly deceptive to me. But it seems to be a standard in the watch industry.
The other watch that I kept is the casual Citizen Eco Drive Black:
This cost $130 at Amazon. Its primary attraction for me is that despite being a quartz it doesn't ever need a battery change because it gets charged via light through the face. The manual says that two minutes in direct sun will keep it running for half a year.
It's quite readable, but again, the luminescent features are worthless. When I was a kid you could literally read a book by the brightness from the luminescent hands of a kid's watch, but these days it's all worthless. Geez, a little radioactivity never hurt anyone.
This Citizen is the same size (42mm) as the Stührling, so I wish it were a bit bigger, but this one is less of a fashion statement. Not that I have much to do with fashion statements anyway. I can't read the date (so didn't bother setting it), but hey, 19~this one is water resistant to 100m!