The Dan Henry 1962 is both annoying and great
My Dan Henry 1962 has a very specific job to do, one which he does very well, and it's preventing me from making stupid mistakes.
The kind of mistakes that ends up with you paying too much for a disposable plastic wonder that doesn't even look like the original.
Lucky for me, Dan Henry inoculated the 1962 with a good enough dose of UG and Omega vintage to help me fend off the plastic plague.
As an affordable quasi vintage chrono, it's quite brilliant. You get the twisting lugs, case dimensions, pushers and style of a vintage chrono without having to worry about vintage issues - such as not working at all for example.
However, once you decide to use it as an everyday watch or a working chrono the 1962 stops from being brilliant and gets downright annoying.
The same panda dial and handset that were inspired by Universal Genève are also inspiring you to wear a more legible watch, because you are not going to be able to tell the time when the hands are above the black registers, which is where they are positioned for most of the day.
Since it use a VK movement from Seiko, it also suffer from their 24Hr indicator fetish, which basically takes away a feature potentially useful to 100% of chronographs users and replace it with one which is useless to 99.999% of the population. Seiko could have used this register to have a 15 minutes counter or a dual time zone, but instead they wisely decided to display there the same information you can get by sticking your head out of a window and looking at the sky. For all practical purposes it could just as well be a blank circle painted black.
But today I'm going to let it do its primary job and I'll just use my phone to tell me the time. There, problem solved.
I'm a big fan of watches that are interesting because they are either unique, have interesting features, well designed or simply offer a great value for their price.
DH is a pretty good antidote for overspending on a luxury or hype watch. I have a similar panda dial on the 1964 and didn’t really notice the black sundials getting in the way and making things illegible. The difference is the 62 has black hands and the 64 has silver hands.
I absolutely agree the 24 hour is useless though.
DH is a pretty good antidote for overspending on a luxury or hype watch. I have a similar panda dial on the 1964 and didn’t really notice the black sundials getting in the way and making things illegible. The difference is the 62 has black hands and the 64 has silver hands.
I absolutely agree the 24 hour is useless though.
For all it's faults - of which there are a multitude, the Seiko SCC solar chronos proved that it is perfectly possible to design a watch with a legible panda dial, something which sadly the DH 1962 isn't.
For all it's faults - of which there are a multitude, the Seiko SCC solar chronos proved that it is perfectly possible to design a watch with a legible panda dial, something which sadly the DH 1962 isn't.
The Speedtimer is very nice but about $100 more than the DH.
"plastic plague" 😂
I was eyeing this one myself. But I really like the Yema Rallygraph for some reason. The lack of ticking seconds bugs me only slightly...
Dan Henry really nails the Paul Newman and Omega vibes though. Very handsome and great price!
"plastic plague" 😂
I was eyeing this one myself. But I really like the Yema Rallygraph for some reason. The lack of ticking seconds bugs me only slightly...
Dan Henry really nails the Paul Newman and Omega vibes though. Very handsome and great price!
I like Yema, I even own 3 watches from them but the Rallygraph with its VK64 exhibit everything that is wrong with Seiko VK movements and their unhealthy 24Hr indicator fetish.
Why did Seiko saddled the VK64 with the useless 24Hr indicator instead of using this register for a running second's hand? What feat of convoluted logic convinced them that yes, with two registers this exactly what we need to do, ditch the seconds hand that is used by everybody and replace it with the slaved 24Hr indicator that nobody asked for.
Love my DH 1962. Here is the Evil version.