FAVOURITE HANDSET & LEAST FAVOURITE

I have a 12 watch collection without a hand set repeating itself, without markers repeating themselves. I guess I like variety 😃. Today I'm gonna go with the Broad Arrow combination 👍.

The Tudor snowflake hand set is really well thought out. At no time is the hour hand obscured by the minute hand. The shapes are all lined up to never conflict with each other or cover another hand or index. The lume application makes it just as clear in the dark too. The BB58 indices are also excellent with the triangle on top and rectangles at 3, 6, and 9. It's instantly legible, any time of day. That has to be my favorite.

My least favorite is anything where the hour and minute hand are the same thickness, or too similar in length. 

Great point my friend!!!!

My favourite is the CW handset, easy to read, and distinctly CW. 

My least favourite hands are mercedes/cathedral hands, I hate how "fussy" they look.

I love snowflake hands.. I’m a Tudor fanboy 🤪

Breguet hands are by far my favorite handset. Over 200 of being design perfection. 

I love the purple heated hands from moritz grossmann. Its so unique! Love the tudor hands too. I think the hand shape uniqueness really makes a watch to stand out besides the case shape. 

They are special my friend!

Wow yes very cool!

Roger smith hand made hands are out of this world too. Both watches mentioned here are ways out of my budget but i love they exist w the care of master watchmakers. 

Least favorite are hands that are unnecessarily short. On the flip side, love hands that are short for a reason. Like the  stumpy hands on the Devil Diver to accommodate those beautiful chunky indices. 

I'm with you on both accounts!

Nodus retrospect ll.  The different color hands on the black dial are an instant read. Great for my bad eyes. 

I like the hands where one is a big arrow. Either like on the Seiko marinemaster/tuna where the hour hand is a short wide arrow or like on the turtle where the minute hand is a long arrow. Particularly like the ones where the minute hand is the long arrow, because the shorter hour hand has such a cool shape

It’s a great discussion, I often rule out some watch due to finding the aesthetics of the hands being wrong.  Too short, too fat, too skinny, too similar, wrong color … all fail the entire watch for myself.  
 

for kicks I recently tried to blue some steel hands for an old Seiko of mine, the painted blue hands looked poor I thought.

sadly only the minute and hour hand fit the pion, the second hand was wrong size so put the old painted one back on.  It clashes with the nice blued ones so it looks a bit wrong 😑 .  Sorry Poor pix, factory black narrow hands were painted , changed to a swoopy and very blue steel hands

My personal favourite is sword hands. Utilitarian, not too pretentious, legible and THE LUME POTENTIAL 

My favorites are the SKX handset and the snowflake of the Tudor.

My favorite is in the 2nd Gen Seiko Monster. At exactly 12:00 the hands line up and look like a rocket ship!

in terms of least favorite, its hard to imagine wanting to buy a watch with a cathedral handset

Hard to argue with that!!!

It took a while for the snowflake hands to grow on me, but their instant legibility won me over. 
 I tend to agree on the SMP300 hands: in the wee hours when the lume has settled down, the thin sides of the skeleton hands are all but invisible.  This leaves only the triangle tip, which can be difficult to pick out from the round indices.

I give you the O-ring watch by Phillipe Starck.....yeah, me neither 😃

Much depends on the style of the watch.  Breguet hands, for example, may be the ideal choice for some dress watches, however they're not really well suited to most sport watches. 

My favorite hands tend to be those where the hour hand is never obscured, as @gbelleh had pointed out. I happen to quite like the snowflake hands of the Tudor, but the Omega broad arrow hands provide that same advantage. Unfortunately, those type of hands tend to obscure chronograph registers, so they aren't necessarily ideal for chronographs.

I find that the length of the hands is just as, if not more important than the shape. I like watches where the hour and minute hand are easily distinguished by their length, with the minute  hand reaching to the minute track, and the hour hand short enough that it leaves a gap between it and the index markers. 

With my ever worsening eyesight, I also really appreciate hands that contrast well against the dial, and appreciate sufficient lume for easy legibility at night as well.

Of the watches in my collection, my favorite hands are probably those on my Omega Speedmaster Broad Arrow.  Other than the fact that the large arrow hour hand obscures the chrono registers, it's pretty much ideal from my perspective.  The fact that the hands are thermally blued adds to the appeal, looking black in most light, but appearing a bright blue when the light strikes them just right.

I also agree that the skeleton hands on the Omega SMP are one of my least favorite, which is one of the reasons that I like my "electric blue" SMP so much - it uses the sword hands in place of the normal skeleton hands usually found in that line.

Oh wow!

The arrow hands on my Planet Ocean are my favourite but might get in the way of a chronograph...