Watches you'd like if it weren't for one detail

[Belligero]

I'm not quite sure what you mean by '..it's so it's lined up with 4:30', but I thought the reason why the window doesn't fall exactly between the 4 and 5, is that the date wheel is slightly too small for the case it's fitted in.

It's one of my pet hates and you see it a lot on budget boutique divers.

Gary

It's because they're too cheap or careless to get a date wheel that's printed at the correct offset for a 4:30/135-degree placement, and just use a standard one that's meant to align at 3:00/90 degrees which ends up being at an oddball fraction-of-31 angle.

[oiljam]

There are many for me like most on here. One I don't like that hasn't been mentioned is the Omega Aqua Terra with an arrow head on the minute hand and not on the hour hand. It just looks odd to me.
Sometimes I read these types of threads and wonder how we find watches we like.



Nice though

[Belligero]

Actually, I've come round to your way of thinking in the past couple of days. It almost should be a mess, but it manages not to be.

As for the Patak, I've never noticed the reduced size of the 5 and 27 before. Probably related to never holding one, but I do think that would annoy me every time I looked at it.

Though I'm not so keen on the mustard lume, I think Breguet did a pretty good job with the type elements.

Regarding the Patek 5140, the problem goes far beyond those crudely-shrunken digits. The entire result is a textbook example of what not to do, from the clumsy stretching distortion, to the sloppy alignment, to the type selection itself. (Arial and Calibri: because nothing says "$100K-level attention to detail" like evoking a default Excel spreadsheet.)

It can't even be called amateurish, as anyone with even a passing interest in the craft of lettering and typography would know to avoid these blunders. What's really difficult to understand is how a family that made its money from selling high-grade dials a few generations ago could demonstrate such complete incompetency in one of the most essential skills of dialmaking.

It's a pity, as the lovely 3940 that preceded it had the masterful hand-lettered work that you'd reasonably expect in a quality watch of this type:



So there's a prime example of one detail that ruins a watch. :)

[Der Amf]

You can be sure that I'll never buy a perpetual calendar whose year display fouls the date function ;)



More relevant to my watch buying activities, hands with red tips get on my wick and all.

[benwoodroffe]

Tudor dive watches
if they were 1-2mm smaller diameter and thin enough to fit under a cuff then i would probably be wearing one right now.

yes i agree, why are they so tall when they're housing ETA 2824-2 movements?

[WatchIng]

Any Greubel Forsey - except for the price!

[benwoodroffe]

German-manufactured products have been marked "Made in Germany" since 1887, even the domestic-market-only ones. There's no "Hergestellt in Deutschland" label.

"Swiss made" isn't exactly Swiss speak either.

[Sinnlover]

"Swiss made" isn't exactly Swiss speak either.

The majority of Swiss watches don't have two languages on the dial though.

[Tinker]

Dials that have to explain themselves ... every time you look at them ...

[vortgern]

Dials that have to explain themselves ... every time you look at them ...

Ha! I think that's the winner!

[Saint-Just]

Dials that have to explain themselves ... every time you look at them ...

Funny that. I was trying to imagine the same watch zeitwerk style where the left windows would be the hours, the right ones the minutes, the short hand the months and the minutes hand the day of the month, with a dial printed accordingly

[Timelord]

The new Stowa logo. Why on earth did Jorg Schauer decide to change it?

[benwoodroffe]

The majority of Swiss watches don't have two languages on the dial though.

Patek will often have Geneve (french spelling for Geneva) and Swiss (English spelling for Suisse) on the dial.