Panda watch – The ExhaustNotes Blog

By Joe Berk

Some time ago, I wrote a blog about panda watches. In it, I mentioned the Orient Panda. I’ve been wearing one for several months now and I thought I’d share my opinions.

From an accuracy perspective, it just doesn’t get much better than what this Orient provides. I set it to the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) official time site, and it is still spot on after several months (no gain, no loss; it is accurate to the second). The watch has a solar-powered quartz movement; you can’t realize that kind of accuracy with a mechanical watch.

I didn’t care for the Orient Panda’s stainless steel bracelet. The bracelet’s appearance is good and the construction appears to be of high quality, but it was uncomfortable. Maybe that was due to the bracelet’s relatively sharp edges. I played around with the adjustment by removing links and then putting them back in, and also by moving the pin to different positions on the clasp, but I couldn’t get it to fit my wrist comfortably. It was either too tight (which made it even more uncomfortable), or it would swim around on my wrist with the watch going from the top of my wrist to the opposite side (I hate it when a watch does that).

Orient and Breitling Pandas. The Orient is $160; the Breitling sells for $7,300. For me, it was an easy decision.

I addressed the fit and comfort issues by ordering an inexpensive alligator style leather band from Strapsco (it was less than $20). The band is black with white leather stitching, and when I put it on the Orient, the watch’s personality changed completely (and for the better). The band matches the watch perfectly and it is much more comfortable. I think it looks much richer (it’s very similar to the $7,300 Breitling Panda mentioned in my earlier blog). I think Orient may be missing the boat here; the Orient Panda should ship with both bands.

The Orient’s solar power feature doesn’t need the sun; interior lighting is good enough. I’ve left my Orient Panda unworn for weeks on a shelf in my office and my office light kept it going. I like the idea that the watch won’t die in the middle of an overseas adventure because the battery gives out. That’s happened to me before.

The Orient Panda can be had in three different colors. I like the one on the left best.

Although I love the panda concept and look, on the Orient Panda the contrast between the hands and the watch face doesn’t work for me. The hands should stand out so that the time is apparent at a glance. It is not on this watch. Maybe me being an old fart is aggravating the issue. I have to stare at the watch to see the hands against the watch face. The hands should be black, I think, as was the case on my 1970s-era Seiko Panda. Maybe the Orient colors will work for you. Orient offers this watch in three different colors, but I don’t care for the look of the other two. Interestingly, the Orient Panda with the gray face is only $135 on Amazon, undercutting the price on the other Orient Panda color options by $25.

The Orient Panda has bits of lume on the numbers and the hands. The lume is small, though, and like me, they are not terribly bright. I found the lume tough to see at night. It’s also tough to determine where 12:00 on the watch face is at night.

The Orient Panda has a date feature. I’ll chalk this observation up to being a geezer: I found the date to be so small it was useless. Plus, the date is set back from the watch face, which throws a shadow over the numerals (further obscuring the date).

The Orient Panda has three subdials, which I think is one too many. Like many over-subdialed watches, the 24-hour subdial is a dumb thing. I think I can tell the difference between night and day, I know when it’s a.m. and when it’s p.m., and I can do the mental math instantly to convert 2:00 p.m. is 14:00 hours (I don’t need a subdial for this). If Orient had made the subdial hours settable in hourly increments independent of the main dial’s hourly settings, that would be a cool GMT feature that would allow knowing the time in two different time zones. But like every other watchmaker that includes a 24-hour subdial, you can’t set the subdial separately, so to me all it does is add complexity where none is required.

With regard to the chronograph feature, there is a smaller subdial at the 6:00 position that tracks up to 60 minutes, and seconds are recorded with the watch’s main face second hand. That approach is okay, I suppose, but the second hand really disappears against the watch face due to the aforementioned lack of contrast, and the 0-60 minute subdial is too small. I think Orient would have a better product if they eliminated the 24-hour subdial at the 3:00 position and used that real estate for a larger subdial for the chronograph’s 0-60 minute feature. That would knock the Orient Panda down to two subdials, which I think is just right for a panda watch. It would look more like a panda. But hey, what do I know? Orient sells a lot of watches. I don’t sell any.

At an Amazon price of $160.84, the price on the Orient Panda is impressive, especially when viewed alongside the $7300 Breitling Panda. My complaints notwithstanding, the Orient Panda is a beautiful timepiece at an affordable price. It is both a nice piece of jewelry and a usable everyday watch.

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By Joe Berk

The big photo above is shows three very real pandas. I took it in Chengdu when Gresh and I rode across China. It’s a little blurry because I was shooting through inch-thick super-smudgy glass. The photo is for attention only. This blog is about a different kind of panda.

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When I was a pup back in the 1970s, I bought a Seiko chronograph watch in the Kunsan AFB Base Exchange. The Seiko model number was 6138-8020, and it was $67. I could have bought a Rolex there, too, but I remember thinking who spends $300 on wristwatch? Nope, it would be the Seiko for me.

A Seiko 6138-8020 recently advertised on Ebay for close to $2,000.

The Seiko 6138 was an automatic (i.e., self-winding) watch. It became known as the Panda due to its two black subdials on its white face. I liked the Seiko a lot. I was a jogger in those days, and I used the Seiko every day to time my 3-mile runs. Life was good but I went on to other things. After the Army I worked in the aerospace industry, and like most engineers I went the digital route (I wore a Casio calculator watch). When Ebay became a thing I went on a decluttering craze and the Seiko went down the road. I got $80 for it and I thought I was pretty clever. Then I watched the price of a 6138 go through the roof. That may be why I collect watches now. I’m still trying to make up for that mistake.

I’ve missed my Panda over the years, and I started looking around to see what was available. There are several. In my opinion, Breitling makes the best (and best looking) Panda. Their Premier model is an awesome automatic watch, but who spends $7,299 on a watch?

Breitling’s Premier chronograph. It’s a Holy Grail kind of a watch.

The Hamilton automatic American Classic is another great looking Panda. That answers the mail for me, too, but it’s a little bit rich for my blood. The Hamilton goes for $1,541.

Hamilton makes a Panda chronograph. Nice, but a little bit pricey.

Seiko has a solar-powered Panda watch in their Prospex line that looks pretty good to me. It’s a $700 watch. If you shop around, you can find them for about $500. That’s not bad, but Seiko also makes that watch with a red and blue face and a red and blue bezel (informally known as the Pepsi), and one of these days I’ll probably pull the trigger on one of those. So, I took a pass on the Seiko Panda.

Seiko’s Prospex Panda. This is a very good-looking watch.

Bulova recently got into the Panda shtick as well, with a set of different colors on their Lunar Pilot watch:

The Bulova Lunar Pilot Panda. Nice, and incredibly accurate.

The Bulova is $895. It’s nice, but a few years ago I bought the black dial Bulova that emulates the watch astronaut Dave Scott wore to the moon. With a Lunar Pilot already in the collection, I wanted something else.

I’d been thinking about this Panda thing for a couple of years now, and looking at watches from time to time on the Internet, and you know where this is going. The Internet is insidious, and the marketing emails starting coming in. Amazon sent one on the Orient Panda and it was $188. Seiko and Orient are both owned by Epson (yep, the printer company), and I know Orient to be a good watch (I’ve written before about my Orient moonie automatic watch). Here’s the Orient Panda:

The Orient had great reviews on Amazon, and I liked the look. One thing I’ve learned the hard way is that it’s hard to judge a watch’s appeal by a photo. Some that look great in a picture are totally unappealing in person, and vice versa. But for $188, I’m willing to take a chance. When the watch arrives (it’s a non-US model and it’s shipping directly from Japan), I’ll let you know how it looks. I like the metal bracelet; I may spring for a black leather (with white stitching) band (like the Breitling’s) somewhere down the road.

A few general observations on the above watches. You may have noticed that the bezel rings are different between the Orient Panda and the others. The Orient has equally-spaced marks that show how many seconds have elapsed when the stopwatch is activated. All the other Panda watches have what is known as a tachymeter bezel. The idea behind it is that you can use the tachymeter for determining rate. If you activate the tachymeter when passing a mile marker and then stop it at the next mile marker, it will tell you your actual speed (as long as you are going faster than 60 mph). If you are on a production line, you can activate the stop watch when starting one item and stop the watch when the item is completed. Let’s say it takes 9 seconds to complete one item. The stop watch’s second hand will point to how many items can be completed in an hour (in this case, 400). The tachymeter is a cool feature but I have never used it, so the fact that it is not on the Orient is okay by me.

I’ve mentioned automatic and solar powered watches. An automatic watch is a mechanical, self-winding watch. For some collectors, there’s a panache associated with a mechanical watch. I feel that way, and I have automatic watches. The downsides of an automatic watch are that if you don’t wear them for a few days they stop and then you have to reset them, and they are less accurate (typical automatic watch accuracy is about ±25 seconds per day. Some are better than others. If you’re a fanatic about time, you’ll probably reset an automatic watch about once a week. For watch geeks that’s okay. We like playing with our watches.

Solar powered watches are essentially quartz watches that are powered by the sun instead of needing a battery. The downside is the watch has to be in the light (either sunlight or artificial light) a little bit each day to keep running. The upsides are that if you don’t wear a solar powered watch but keep it where the light hits it, it keeps running, and solar powered (and quartz regulated) watches are phenomenally accurate (to the tune of a few seconds per month). I have solar powered watches that I haven’t worn for a year or more, and they accurate to within a few seconds of the time.gov website. That’s pretty cool.

Back to that ride into Chengdu to see the real pandas…you can read all about it in Riding China. Here’s a short video of Joe Gresh and yours truly slogging through Chengdu traffic on Zongshen RX1 motorcycles.