Last time we saw an Ernst Benz piece reviewed on our pages, it was back in May when John took a look at the Chronolunar. While today’s piece shares some similarities in styling, it’s definitely a much different watch that stands on its on. Read on to see what I thought of the Chronoflite World Timer.
As befitting something with the word flight (or flite, in this case) in it’s name, it has some rather appropriate aviation cues. The most obvious one are the propeller-inspired hands. Normally, that sort of thing tends to turn me off on a watch, but here, I do actually like it. The other main cue I picked up on is actually hiding on the dial itself. There’s a nice globe (meridians and the like) in relief on the dial. So, not only is it an additional aviation-related cue, you’ve got additional detail on the dial to break things up a bit.
So, we’ve got that part of the name out of the way – what about the world timer? Not surprisingly, that’s indicated by the red hand on the dial. I like that this actually has a two-step design. First, you’ve got the arrow head that indicates the hour on the inner ring on the dial; you then have the needle extension to indicate the city being tracked. How this works, you rotate the inner bezel (using the crown at 10 o’clock) to align the city your in (or in the timezone you’re in) to where that needle tip is. Then, you can look around the dial to any other city, and know immediately what time it is.
This takes a little getting used to, as we’re more used to a GMT hand that we can set independently from the main time display. While you can’t do that here (the GMT hand is tied to the main hands), you do have a lot more flexibility here in seeing whatever time you want, for any city – without having to remember the time zone differences. While many of us may not need to do that, if you’re working with folks across different time zones (or continents), it could be a handy tool to have.
And that’s where we’ll leave things for today. Tomorrow, we’ll wrap up our review of this watch.
