Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Appearance I wanted a self-powered watch, but there are a lot of those. I bought this one because it was one of the best-looking. It's a very flexible piece of hardware: it's not too large or too small, looks nice with jeans or slacks, and is altogether a simple and classic everyday watch, a subtle accent for almost any outfit. The one unpleasant surprise in this department was how shiny the thing is. It's not clear from Amazon's picture, but almost every surface except for the bracelet is practically mirrored. The markers, the ring around the case, the hands--they GLEAM. It makes the watch a little more eye-catching than I'd thought. Solar power The guts of this particular watch--the Seiko V158 caliber, if you're curious--have a 10 month power reserve after a single day's exposure to strong sunlight. Um, awesome. I don't worry about batteries. Readability Look really close at the Amazon photo. There are tiny individual ticks for each minute. It's not hard to see what the exact time is to the second. The day and date are also easy to read. Night readability This watch uses a special kind of luminous paint called LumiBrite. Man, it's great! It glows for a long time, and it doesn't take bright light to get it going. My only complaint is that Seiko was a little stingy with the stuff--there are tiny glowing dots at each 5 minute mark, and just barely a sliver for each hand. If you're not well-oriented, it can be hard to tell which of the glowing dots is at the 12 o'clock mark. Fit Here the watch earns a rare thumbs down. The bracelet links are rather large. Taking off four links left the watch clearly too large, sliding around my arm and onto my hand when I moved my arm, the face moving askew or to the side of my arm. But take off five links and it's suddenly so tight I can feel it grasping me and see the marks when I take it off. My wrist must be exactly the wrong size. Lame. Careful with this one if you have small wrists. Accuracy Does it keep time? Yes. Because it's basically a quartz watch with an extra system to get energy from light, it has the same accuracy as a quartz watch-- +/- 15 seconds a month for this movement. Not bad at all. Many of the self-powered watches I was looking at were self-winding "automatic" watches--because of their mechanical movements, they're prone to be off by much more than this.