Comparing a high-quality Rolex knockoff with a real one

I know lots of women who wear the men’s version, because they (the women) are built a bit ‘sturdier’ than the women that the designer envisioned.

The older and ‘squintier’ I become, the bigger I like my watchfaces.
This is larger than life-size. Now try to tell what time it is - to the minute - while driving fast.

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Hah that’s great. Seems like no one is happy with these gendered choices.

I just want the most basic-looking watch, just smaller to match my wrist. So lots of non-flashy brands usually sell a “ladies” version, which works for me.

I’ll take the one on the right, don’t care what it’s called :slight_smile:

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I’m not sure what you mean by “had a sweep seconds” unless you mean “it was a good fake BECAUSE it had sweep seconds.”

Rolexes are, to a first approximation, all mechanical, and like all mechanical watches have always had sweep second hands. For a long time, you could tell some decent fakes (decent in the sense that they kept time) were fake because they had a quartz movement and therefore had a jumping second hand.

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ah, peer pressure!

I recall one porn site where the commenters (or one of them) had a fetish for the G-Shock, and would always ask the performer to wear hers when she was shooting movies.

Not kinkshaming, but I always wondered what formative experience triggered that particular one.

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Good news! You don’t need to be a porn producer to indulge specific interests. You can hire a porn producer to produce custom made kink. Indeed, this particular production calls for a very specific watch.

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Sounds like it was a mispronunciation that created a strong association!

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I disagree with that completely.

First of all even the highest end watches will break and wear out if not properly taken care of on a regular schedule

Second of all high-end watches generally are well-made though not always. A cheap mechanical watch has horrible tolerances to begin with and inferior materials, though that is also not always true it depends on the maker of the watch

Third of all the idea that any quartz watch will work long into the future is laughable even when it’s high-end. Patek Phillipe does make a really nice quartz watch with custom circuitry, but the circuitry is still the same circuitry that everything else uses, at a component level. There is a 200,000$+ diamond studded Cartier floating around somewhere that has a $10 quartz movement in it.

Forgetting the degradation of circuitry just looking at the oscillator in any quartz timepiece it is sealed in an inert atmosphere canister that after about 10 years sometimes earlier sometimes later starts to lose it’s perfect seal and air gradually seeps in.

What this means is even if it is a super high-end quartz watch it is crippled from the get-go and will need a circuit board replacement after 10 maybe 15 years if you’re serious about keeping good time.

Once that seal breaks the watch will gradually gain in time and you can’t do anything to correct it even with the trimming potentiometer on the circuitry if it’s there.

So no there is no watch that last forever and least of all a quartz watch. I get that a lot of people seem to think they keep working forever without service, just because they are moving but that is not the same as keeping time.

Even the best Mechanicals need regular service.

And if we didn’t get rid of smartphones every two years or so if you actually kept one for 10 years the same thing might happen if there is a quartz oscillator in this somewhere.

Lastly I am a trained watchmaker but even I think no one needs a watch. At least not in modern society. I don’t consider my pursuit to make a handmade watch noble because it is not helping humanity in any way. I am not a saint and I could not become a doctor or something else that helps people directly I just have skills and my skills leave me with the ability to do this.
So I have chosen to make the most of what I can do.

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my pet theory is that it’s a hold-over of 90s hip hop style, where all the clothes and shoes were exaggeratedly over-sized.
the current hip hop style is skinny jeans and etc, but the young kids can’t afford high-end watches (except the few rappers selling the most units.)
the middle-aged professionals that can afford high-end watches grew up with the big style fashions, so that’s what they want. also, Americans are fat. So there’s a confluence of factors contributing to the big watch popularity.
I’m skinny but I can’t afford that shit anyway.
Panerai looks pretty cool, though. to big for me, but cool.

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I think more the return of the Wall Street era yuppie look. First noticed it around 06/07 while working in NY financial district. For a while there the fashion for watches had been trending toward the retro, small and impractical. Along with smaller utilitarian classic quartz watches. But right around when the all that financial horse shit started to peak, and as the ecconocolypse started to fire off you started seeing the financial class around NY (and other cities I visited around that time) all start to dress like Gordon Gecko. Very wide ties, often tied in double Windsor knots. Pale blue shirts with white collars and cuffs (often with loud paisley on the reverse of said cuffs). Light brown shoes with navy pants. Lots of pin stripes. Longish, slicked back, Patrick Bateman hair. Every one of them with a big, chunky, self winding watch from a classic luxury brand. Rolex, Omega, Breitling. The ones anyone would recognize. Everyone around the financial district running around looking like Donald Trump circa 91. And then the startup guys started dressing that way too, and next thing you know every sales guy in my corporate video company was doing it too.

That was the first place I noticed not just the big watches coming back, but the specific type of big watch that’s currently a thing. Hip Hop through the 90’s did feature some big watches, but they were a hell of a lot more variable. Didn’t generally involve the same brands. And were often worn loose and hanging. I’d say that’s had some influence on it. Like big watches seem to be a thing in the weird NBA driven fashion thing that’s going on, which is heavily influenced by various eras in Hip Hop fashion. But I’ve heard that described as “urban preppy” as well so it could come from either or both.

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But what I want to know is, was that a real Pentax K1000 on the table, or a knockoff? And what was it doing there?

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Dunno. Appreciation for things mechanical that don’t require batteries?

The K1000 is an almost-all metal, mechanically (springs, gears, levers) controlled, manual-focus SLR with manual-exposure control.[4] It is completely operable without batteries.[5] Batteries are only required (one A76 or S76, or LR44 or SR44) for the light metering information in the viewfinder.

If a mechanical Rolex were, say, to have an LED illuminated dial it would still be a mechanical watch. Same for the Pentax camera with it’s optional electric photo cell for metering (there are many ways to calculate exposure, especially outdoors, that do not require a meter of any kind, and you can also choose to use a separate incident or reflective meter, which is more accurate than the simple meter in the camera.) The K1000 is kind of famous for being a mechanical camera.

yeah, but it was cheap as hell.
the analogous camera to Rolex would be Leica.
the K1000 would be like a Seiko 5 series: all-mechanical, works great, and cheap.

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The battery is only for the light meter integrated into the view finder. Its a great little light meter. Which though battery driven is still insanely analog. Its basically a needle dial. But the camera will function 100% without it. The same way you need batteries to use a flash or other accessories, this one just happens to be built into the thing.

I’d take it even further. I have my dad’s k1000 in the closet. My parents were broke as fuck, and could still afford one with a couple of lenses. They’re closer to those more recent all mechanical, self winding Swatches. Yes its more expensive than a quality mass market quartz watch (including Swatch’s). But it was cheap enough to be attainable nearly regardless of income.

Having shot my way through film school with dad’s k1000. The separate light meter is more precise and more specific in that it’ll give you numbered results in standard units. Its not really any more accurate until you start getting into pricey digital meters. And the view finder is a fuck ton more convenient and intuitive. On more than one occasion I shot identical or similar compositions using the light meter and maths expecting better results. Only to have it turn out damn near identical to the integrated one and experience. It got to the point where we were using the k1000 as a light meter when shooting video for projects. Because it was faster. That shit made the rounds. I think 6 out of 7 of my roommates used the thing for photo classes. And when it wasn’t doing tours of duty helping non majors invade the photo department it was getting passed around by the actual photo students or getting borrowed for event photo stuff for campus events and documenting thesis projects for grad students. At a certain point we were even using it for passport photos at the camera shop and photo lab I worked at. This was the last throws of film, digital had already mostly taken over. Consumers were still using disposables and fine art folks were still on film.

Thing just works. And it makes taking nice photos easy and fast. But what it boiled down to is people just really like using it, and understand how it works nearly instantly. Whole stupid art school full of mechanical cameras, flashy digital shit, and every one wanted to mess around with that camera. A fair bit of its lingering reputation is in that little light meter. Its not neccisarily any more comprehensive or what have than other integrated exposure meters. But it was crazy accurate for what it was, particularly in such a cheap camera.

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By more accurate I was thinking of incident or spot metering, which, if you know what you are doing, are far more accurate than center weighted metering. I’m not really referring to the precision of the meter, I’m more referring to the fact the camera’s photo cell has no idea what part of the image you want to expose at what value. It’s going for an 18% grey average exposure, even if you are trying to photograph a white cat in front of a white curtain, or a black cat in front of a black curtain.

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Sorry, Vermes82. I didn’t mean to mock. I have many friends who speak other languages, and a few English-speaking friends who are dyslexic and cannot spell at the best of times. Consider my wrists slapped, and I shall try to do better in future. If I tried to post in French I would be ashamed.

I don’t mind.

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Eh, you learn to love centerweight and spot metering once you get used to compensating for it.

I shot with an FM10 for six years or so. Now my DSLR is normally locked in manual spot mode. :slight_smile: