What time is it? Watches and horology

Yeah definitely this too. But in all seriousness does anyone buy a RO Offshore predominantly for the aesthetics?

Which is wanky, but I’m not sure if more/less wanky than buying the real thing for ‘clout’.

Design-wise you might argue a sub or an explorer are in the same territory.

Personally, I think Rolexes are very high quality, durable watches, gilded with decades of luxury marketing. I don't think they are particularly interesting from a design perspective.

Yeah good point, I think this might be no different

They're references for design, wasn't it Wiliam Gibson who said the Explorer was the Platonic ideal of "watch"?

Hard to overstate their importance in terms of design when so many other watches are referenced against them in terms of how successful their own designs are.

Most of it looks like people flipping Rolexes and Pateks through them, no? They do not look like a new watch dealer, either authorised or grey market. E.g. for Grand Seiko they only have three individual watches, not a wide range like WoM would have.

It's confused by them using stock brand imagery instead of photos of the actual watches for sale but I cannot see the term "new" anywhere on those product pages. I think they are dodging the actual status of these watches. Guessing it's a mix of grey market "unworn" stuff and preowned.

Agree it's entirely opaque and unclear exactly what it is that they are selling.

Watches World uses sophisticated proprietary software to continuously analyze and compare global watch prices. Our algorithms calculate and adjust prices daily allowing us to offer the lowest prices on the market.

Sounds like a bit of exchange rate hedging too.

I suppose the question is a) are the watches genuine (I'd guess yes) and b) what happens if one goes wrong - would the saving be wiped out by the cost of resolution if the watch is borked.

That JLC is ~£2,000 less than retail, for reference.

You might find you can negotiate a similar discount from an AD, in the case of a brand like JLC. Especially coming up to the end of a quarter.

I'm very bad at that.

I bought my Black Bay from a similar place (although they were much more transparent about it) and as a grey import it still had the warranty card stamped, just at a store in Cyprus or something.

I ended up buying the classic all-black GA-2100 to go with my skeleton one… Love the 2100 design and sub-£70 was too good to refuse.

I was really close to getting a GW-M5610U-1BER*

But I'm not sure about the negative dial. I found a tutorial on how to reverse it. But it buying something to add to another project I can't get around to didn't seem sensible.

Also fuck me is their site painful on a mobile.

*is that right? The all black solar one.

Yeah I think that's right, I had a look at that but saw photos where the screen looked like it might be difficult to read

I picked up the skeleton one for £76, thank you for posting the code. Second G-Shock I've picked up this year partly because of you!

Yeah, almost chose that instead but I think I'll appreciate the radio control

I'm a G-Shock enabler… I think I need an intervention

GW-M5610U-1BER

Yeah, the negative displays on these look cool but they are pretty poor for legibility. Even in bright daylight they're much harder to read than the standard LCDs. The big draw of the 5610 is that they're kind of the ultimate practical watch - solar, radio sync, world time, chrono, water and shock resistant etc - so failing on the legibility front sits a bit odd with it.

My black/white casioak has the negative display on the subdial. Which is sort of fine as you've got hands for the main function of the watch. But I couldn't live with permanent negative display on a full digital watch.

This is what it would look like modded:

Which is exactly what I want.

What about the GW-5000U-1JF? It's a bit more expensive but looks quite like the photo you posted

The STN displays on B5000 are OK negative, much better than the old LCD

Around £230-260 from the looks of it as its a jdm model.

I might be wrong about this but I feel like I remember it being bigger when I was comparing it a while back.

Is that a module switch or just the display component? Is that not quite expensive to do? I would tend to agree with @rj, the GW-5000 might be what you want and even though it's a JDM model that you'd have to import it could work out not much more expensive. (Also, it's a slightly more deluxe model that has a screw down caseback like the original G-shocks did, which is why it's more expensive in the first place.)

Oh - looks like the updated version (with the LCD backlight) is officially available in Europe, though I can't find it on the UK G-Shock website:

https://www.watch.co.uk/g-shock-origin-radio-controlled-solar-digital-gents-watch-gw-5000u-1er.htm