The 70’s were a wild time indeed, and, even though marking a golden age for Japanese watch manufacturers such as Seiko and their younger brother, Orient, the never-ending stream of models at the time may be too wild to be universally accepted. So, Orient has made an attempt to re-invent those designs in their Neo 70’s collection, and this one watch is their best attempt at it, in my opinion. But watch talk cannot be objective, right?

As a Russian saying goes, everything new is just long forgotten old. This watch takes it literally being an upgrade of the older times’ design, detail by detail. First, the movement is a light-powered quartz, which is just one of the ways Orient conveys in this watch the idea of natural evolution of it’s watchmaking. To the delight of people not into quartz movements, the chronograph second hand moves in a mechanical way as you use the pusher, and counts up to an hour with a satisfying sweep across the dial when finished. The next evolution concerns the weird square hour markers ever present on the watches of the time. Here, they are, I would say, tank-shaped and consist of the light-absorbing part and two polished insertions, reflecting every bit of light falling on them and bringing the whole concept to life. Lume is also present both on the hands and in tiny dots on the tachymeter scale.

This watch surely is a pleasure to look at, even when not really needing the time to be told. Clever gold plating on the inner side of the subdials, all the reflective surfaces, the colour scheme – it begs your attention and you just can’t take eyes off it. But it does not come perfect, of course. The alarm complication is really hard to set and I am yet to use it even once, thus this is not exactly good value for money, even though it is around 300$.
Overall, it is just outdated enough to feel fresh as ever.