Invariably, as warmer weather is coming upon us, many will turn their thoughts to hitting the open road on two wheels. For those who just can’t (or won’t) ride, or have sold their bikes (like me), then Orient may have another way for you to get a motorcycle in your life.
How, you might ask? Simply by naming one of their models Motorcycle. And just like many motorcycle manufacturers, simply choosing a different color scheme gets you a different model name.
Colors aside, these various models are largely similar, and all share the following:
- Orient Automatic movement (46S50) with 4o-hour power reserve
- 44mm stainless steel case (12mm thick) with screw-down crown
- Mineral crystal
- 22mm lugs with a leather strap (deployant clasp) or stainless steel bracelet (double push-button release)
- 1 year international warranty
- 100m water resistance
This is a semi-skeletonized model, which I’ve become more of a fan of lately. Most obvious is the cutout at 6 o’clock which allows you to see the most activity that occurs in a movement. Surprisingly, there’s also a narrow cutout at 3 o’clock, which I suppose allows you to see the stem at the various engagement points.
Rounding out the dial, we’ve got the sub-seconds at 6 o’clock, and then the power reserve indicator at 12 o’clock. While I’m glad to see the PR indicator, it just looks odd to me. The cutout for it is simply too large (extending past the 40 hour mark), and isn’t exposing any more of the movement. Not sure how that decision was made, but it should be redesigned.
And as long as we’re redesigning things, I think the hands should be worked on as well. In practice, the blued, lume-filled hands work well on most watches. Here, however, they’re mostly white on a white/gray background – which I think will negatively impact readability in the long run.
Finally, we have the numerals for the watch. On one hand, I like the fact that they appear to be floating, given how they were printed (I can’t tell if that’s a layer on the dial, or if they’re on the crystal). The typeface used, however, just seems plain. You have a retro-futuristic font used for the model name on the dial – why couldn’t that be carried onto the numbers?
Suffice it to say, while there are interesting facets to this watch, there are too many design elements that I think need work for me to look at adding a model like this to my collection, or recommending it to someone else.
Add in the price ($690 to $890, depending on color scheme), even with the 30% discount code (currently, that code is SPRING2012), and that pushes it over to the “do not buy” side of the board for me. Perhaps if you ran across one secondhand on the FS boards, it might be worth taking a flier.
