Re: Derek (and others) opinions please.
: have you seen the seiko auto relay watches they
: actually hibernate after three days of
: non-movement and awaken to a shake of the
: watch.
I haven't seen the 'auto relay' watches, but they sound something like their Kinetic line. I believe that Omega makes a hybrid watch similar to the Kinetic... the 'Omegamatic'. I'm partial to mechanical movements, and also to Swiss watches. However, in the $200-300 range, there aren't many watches that can compete with the Seiko automatics (note that their diver autos usually feature Rolex cloned styling, and are only available on rubber straps).
On my moonlighting job last week, one of the contractors with whom I was working was wearing a vintage Seiko diver. I commented on it, and (as it turns out), he'd worn it everyday for the past 25 years, and has never had it serviced, adjusted, or anything. To quote him, "It loses a little bit of time, so I just set it a few minutes ahead every few weeks or so." Very impressive. I've mentioned this before in previous posts, but I'll write it again, because it keeps coming up... A friend of mine has a 1970s vintage Seiko automatic (similar in styling to a Rolex President), which had the neatest feature I've seen on a watch, to this day: The date could be advanced by simply PUSHING IN on the crown like a stopwatch button.
I just love watches. I'm fascinated by all types and gimmicks, from the Citizen Eco-Drive, to the Timex Indiglo, Luminox, manual-winds, automatics, quartz, and expecially the hybrids (Kinetic and Omegamatic). But, I'm a sucker for an automatic.
At 25, I'm of this younger generation full of people who don't realize that there is such a thing as a mechanical watch (most of my peers ask me, "What do you mean, it's got no electronics?"); They don't know that little more than 30 years ago, you couldn't just pick up a watch for $15 (2002 dollars) at any drug store... the cheap quartz technology that makes it possible for 98% of regular folks to wear watches these days had not yet been invented. In other words, if you wanted to know the time, you had two options: mechanical or "Hey, Mister... You got the time?" Can you imagine a world without watches?
A few years ago, I ran across an old photo from a family wedding, circa 1955; The first thing that I noticed was that nobody had any watches on! The only watches in the huge group photo were my grandfather's Rolex and my grandmother's manual-wind Elgin, which my mother still has). What could they do? Mechanical movements were expensive back then, too. But, unlike today, there was no cheap quartz alternative. So, most folks just didn't own watches. How sad!
