Some people use their smartphone to check the time. Other people use smart Apple/Samsung/Huawei watches. I preferred to spend about €109 on an automatic Orient TriStar RA-AB0020S19B.

18 days later, I’m still happy with it. Yes, the F4902 calibre is non-hackable, non-windable, but it works pretty well. Of course, a non-automatic watch that is hand-wound every day at about the same time has the potential of being more precise, but here’s how this guy behaves:

  • On a relatively active day, when it’s worn a lot, it runs 0…+1 s/day.
  • On a sedentary day when it’s only worn symbolically, it runs -4…-5 s/day.
  • On a very busy day with a lot of walking (~12 km), it can go up to +4 s/day.
  • In the last 3 days, it ran slower by a total of 4 seconds.
  • Two days later: in the last 5 days, it ran faster by a total of 7 seconds (as I said, an automatic’s accuracy depends on how much you move your hand).

Hard to beat for the price!

The dial is not entirely flat in design, but with such a bad phone camera I can’t take a good shot of it:

The lume (luminescence) is also pretty decent, but I didn’t time it to see how long it lasts, and I won’t take pictures of the screen in the dark. What’s good is that during the day, either on a sunny day or under strong artificial light, it manages to quickly accumulate some luminescence, so that when entering a darker place, it would glow in the semi-obscurity. Not being a diver watch, I don’t care that it probably doesn’t glow for a long time. You should be aware that all watches, even the most expensive ones, have their lume diminishing in time: the exposure to light wears it out, so to speak.

OK, here’s an attempt: glowing in the… daylight.

Finally, what I got in 8 days was this: after exactly 7 days, +17 seconds faster (with the last 3 days of the period being busy, active days), then after the 8th day, +18 seconds faster (for the entire 8-day period), because it was a lazy Sunday. I should probably only adjust it about twice a month, each time setting it with exactly 1 minute back.