Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big fan of the F105W which is basically the same watch with a vastly improved backlight that lights up the whole LCD. It makes a great watch extremely usable at night.

I'd also recommend the Casio G-Shock GWM5610 which admittedly is about 5 times more expensive at $111 but it has UTC time and is absolutely bulletproof, along with radio sync and solar with solar charge indicator. It's currently my favorite among my modest under $200 collection of watches because it's so practical.

I love unconnected watches because they tell the time and have a few other basic features without vendors competing for your eyeballs in constantly evolving ways.

Side note: I'd avoid Seiko even though they kicked off the quartz crisis by launching the world's first quartz watch in 1969, their product quality is crappy these days with missing features on some nice looking watches, and some bugs in their mechanical movements.

On a separate note, I find the luxury watch market to be quite hilarious (especially the pretentiously eloquent way a customer will describe their "acquisition") but I do keep an eye on it for fun and classics like the Rolex Sub Date have dropped by over 20% in price on the used market in the past 10 months (source is Chrono24 which charts prices). My guess is we'll see the used luxury market flooded in 2023/24 as extravagant purchases made during boom times are liquidated for cash.

>radio sync

Such and underrated feature! There is a good list of Multiband watches that works across multiple continents that way

https://shockbase.org/function_page_dyn.php?function=multi_b...

I don't really understand your comment about avoiding Seiko (and yes as a Seiko collector I'm a bit triggered). In my experience Seiko makes absolutely great quality watches still with maybe the only issues generally being the occasional misaligned chapter ring though I pretty much only collect Seiko mechanical watches so maybe the situation is different with their quartz watches.

Citizen also makes some particularly interesting quartz watches the Chronomaster series (which is a Japanese domestic market exclusive) has one of the most reliable watch movements ever with a rating of +/-5 seconds a YEAR.

Seiko 5 automatic movement is on a par with the Rolex automatic movement according to my friend who is an official Rolex repairer.

They are often quite similar in design though I'm guessing the Rolex uses quite a bit higher quality materials.

Quality of Seiko 5 is pretty good, but IIRC the Rolex movement is more compact.

Well they're both Automatic mobements with a Swiss lever escapement design, but the Rolex is finished better and has better balance adjustment (free-sprung balance). It is also factory adjusted as opposed to the Seiko 5 movement.

I'm in the same boat, won't ever touch a seiko and refuse to do so for for 2 main reasons:

1. They have the gut of naming their watch "save the ocean" and doing things with PADI when the country they operate in is involved in commercial whaling, still go on fishing species of tuna that are on the verge of extinction or throw sharks back in water still alive after removing their fins just to make some soup. That's appalling, if North Korea would make a watch called "human right" we'd all laught and move on but, I'm not to support a company that make "dive watch" pretending to care about the ocean and not saying/doing anything toward what's actually happening in the country they operate in.

2. I'm a yema fan boy and seiko used to own yema in the 90s. Under their stewardship, they introduced plastic to hold the movement in place instead of the previous metal piece and did change the case onto a cheap low cost copy of what was available before and removed the original hands by some mercedes hands, copying everything Rolex was doing in a cheap package. That period in Yema's history was terrible, hopefully they ended up selling the brand after a few years but boy how did they make a mess

Well I don't know that Seiko has been directly involved in whaling in any way and some of the proceeds from the "save the ocean" line are given to divers that work to remove marine debris so that seems like a really odd connection to make.

> F105W which is basically the same watch with a vastly improved backlight

Can’t stress this enough. The F-91W is useless at night because the backlight brightness is terrible. The F105W has an indiglo-style “EL” light that is very effective. The two watches are nearly identical from an aesthetic perspective. The functions are identical as are the buttons.

Indiglo has good looks and function. What I dislike is that it requires a high-voltage driver. As tiny and low-current as that may be, it is electrically and even slightly acoustically noisy, and not something that belongs in a low-voltage wristwatch.

Considering I might turn it on once per night for a second or less, I’m not concerned. Is the risk that it affects the timekeeping?

Why not? An incandescent backlight _physically gets hot_, I'd argue that has even less place in this application. It's just what they had at the time.

But in either case, it's perfectly safe. There's no way to touch either the hot parts or the high-voltage parts. And even if there was, the battery doesn't have enough oomph to do anything more than tingle once the prickly part was trying to drive something as massive as a fingertip.

I noticed the noise too, when I owned one, but I figure silencing it would've cost size, weight, and power. And the noise was never more than a curiosity, so I'll take it!

They aren't talking a out safety, they're talking about efficiency and accuracy. A boost converter is inefficient and you don't have power to waste like that in a watch. And electrical noise perturbs the timekeeping parts.

However your comparison to incandescent and your point about the momentary nature are both valid I'd say. If they had magic, they'd have used it. So they took something fundamentally inefficient and added engineering to make the best of it. A bad thing, done as well as possible,

You could say almost the same things about incandescent. It's not electrically noisy, but temperature sure does perturb the timekeeping, and incandescent definitely wastes power. Especially if you need the filament to last indefinitely instead of replacing it easily.

I've never had any problems with my f-91w at night. I can't use it as a reading light like the EL backlights, but it also doesn't ruin my night vision.

How does the brighter backlight affect battery life? Doesn't the original model have a 7-year battery life?

I think EL uses less current than an incandescent, which is what the F-91W has. Anyway, the battery life always lasts longer than the band for me. Years. I replace it when the band tears, which is before the battery dies.

Is it incandescent!? I would have expected an led, or at least a process improvement where it was replaced by an led.

It’s still an incandescent, unfortunately. If they changed it to an LED, it might be bright enough to be useful.

Allegedly, it's LED now:

'The small light bulb was replaced by a LED diode, but the intensity of the tired firefly remained'

https://www.hodinky-365.com/blog/casio-f-91w-review

I wear F-91W every day and FWIW, the light is adequate to see time at night.

I had been wearing the F105W for about two decades and then decided that I want an upgrade. I tried to get as much value for my money and ended up buying the LCW-M100TSE-1AER from Casio's Lineage collection for 240€. Features are

- Titanium casing and strap

- sapphire crystal glass

- Wave ceptor (radio signal receiver)

- Solar cell

- Light (not great, but usable)

If Casio combined these features in a classic looking LCD watch that does not cost a fortune, I would not only buy one, but three of them. I know, there is the MRG-B5000D-1, but with a price tag of 3500€, which is more than then times the price of my watch with fewer features (no waveceptor) this is a bit expensive IMO.

I love my GWM5610, the only thing I dislike is how hard to press the buttons are and the bad display angles. But other than that it's a damn brick. And the radio sync is magic.

I have a casio g-shock MTG with solar and radio sync that I bought more than 10 years ago. Wear it almost every day. Battery indicator is still at full. Once I had to buy a small metal rod (for a few euros) for the metal strap, and still going strong.

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