Good Watch - Terrible Bracelet - Timex Enigma

Hello and welcome to Just One More Watch and welcome today to a brief review of the latest release by Timex. I believe it's full title is the Timex Q1975 Enigma Reissue which does rather tell us most of what we need to know about it doesn't it. It's a Timex, it's from their Q range and it's a reissue of a model from 1975 which by the way was actually a pretty good year if you watch was sent to me by Watch Direct who are a Sydney retailer of Timex and a heap of other watches. This one has been super popular, it's out of stock at the moment but if you want one for only 319 Aussie dollars there's a notify me when available button. Big shout out to Andrew and the team at Watch Direct. So what was so special about the original then that has this reissue selling so fast? Let's flip the camera and find out. Alright let's get into it, let's start by looking at the packaging however if you watched my quadruple Timex unboxing video last month you'll already have seen the packaging. If you missed that one then this is the packaging. It's a box, nothing that's going to detain us particularly long here today, probably quite reasonable packaging considering the RRP. Well you saw the Aussie RRP 399 but Watch Direct have it for 319. I believe these are 199 US dollars but nobody pays retail for Timex so do not pay retail for Timex. They sell a lot of watches directly as well, you can usually get 15 maybe even 20% by signing up for one of their email lists etc etc. Is it worth that? Is it even worth the discounted price? Let's have a look at the watch and find out. A couple of bits and pieces in here. Warranty, hang tag, it's a two year warranty by the way on one of these which is not too bad actually. A lot of companies will only give you a one year warranty on quartz so that they're not replacing batteries just before the end of the warranty period. However, Timex must be confident that they have put a decent sale in the back of this one. Before we look too much further at the new watch let's have a look at the old watch and you know what? The old watch looks very very similar to the new watch. It is essentially a reissue. Slight differences in the gaps between the day and the date complication from old to new but the philosophy is very much the same. They called this a mystery dial in the first place because the hands match the dial colour, the majority of the hands match the dial colour and they put a dot covering the pinion on the underside of the crystal as well. The only colour on the originals, just like the reissues, was that red dot second hand which is still very much in evidence on the ticking its way past the date 8 complication at the 3 o'clock. Now this frankly is the best angle to view the Q Timex 1975 Enigma from the top down, thereby getting the best effect of those mystery hands, the floating hands and the dot concealing the pinion. It doesn't look quite as good when you start to view it from an angle. The dot on the underside of the acrylic crystal becomes more and more noticeable as do the majority of the hands rather than just the white tips that you see when viewed from above. So it's a nice effect but don't expect to be taken aback by it all. There's only so much you can do to conceal the hands, the pinion, to make them look like they're floating on the dial. I think Timex have done everything possible but yeah, they're not magicians. Put it that way. Alright then, what are the dimensions? It's a mid-70s watch so it does have mid-70s proportions. They call it a 37. I actually measure it at 37.5mm across the middle. Bang on 13mm thick. Look at how much of that thickness comes from. A piece of big old acrylic crystal, again very much in keeping with the time period. Lug to lug super compact at 42.5mm but they have kept the lug width modern. 20mm lugs. I think that is a great choice. Now the weight as supplied on this rolled link bracelet and as sized for my 7-inch average wrist is 83g. 50m of water resistance from a push-pull crown. Timex never really reveal any nomenclature for their movements. It is a Timex in-house corpse though. So they may not tell you what movement they use but they certainly tell you what battery the movement uses. In this case it's a 377 E-Cell and you should have no difficulty replacing it yourself when the time comes. Though obviously not within the two years that they warrant the watch for. I love these little coin operated battery hatches. Stick a coin there anti-clockwise, pop it off, stick your battery in, screw it back on, job is a good'un. Zero maintenance effectively and these batteries are a couple of dollars each so you can keep your Timex Enigma running for pennies. Nice bit of spec sheet on there as well. All stainless steel construction this one. Screw on four screws in the corner. It says all stainless steel, water resistance 50m and assembled in China. Of course because the world is assembled in China. And it's a stainless steel case and bracelet too. Very, very attractive case. Look at how sculpted this is. It's got a lovely kind of streamlined edge to it. All high polished and I love the way it rises to meet that big piece of acrylic crystal. All high polished though this one has got a couple of scratches in it already and I haven't worn it all that often since it arrived a month ago. Unsigned crown, small sized crown but it is slightly recessed into the case there. Again retro reissues they get away with putting an unsigned crown on all of those and let's just admire the acrylic crystal again. From a couple of different angles, very much part of the whole Timex Q theme. The original Timex Q that rather blew up a couple of years ago had acrylic. The Marmot that I looked at had acrylic. The Timex Q GMT that I looked at had acrylic. It definitely seems to be very much the flavour of the month for all of their reissues as it was with the originals. I don't mind the acrylic but I'm not so sure about them reissuing the bracelet as it was back in the 70s because it's not all that great. You spotted it already I'm sure. It's a rolled link bracelet. Always causes a bit of a shudder particularly amongst those of us who have a few hairs on our arms. Now do you want a classic oxymoron? This is a premium rolled link bracelet. It's not the worst I've seen. You can see the links on the edges which is not great but I'll show you the system that you use to size it and you'll see what I mean. The clasp, unfortunately, nothing premium about this at all. It feels cheap. It is super thin, pressed upper, pressed lower. There's a lot of micro adjust holes and I guess you can't really put a whopping big clasp on a watch at 37.5 mm that's straight out in 1975 but that doesn't mean to say it's not worth complaining about because it's not all that pleasant on wrist at all. This is what I mean by premium rolled link. It's got these instructions on the underside as to how you size it up. Open and close. So you get a little screwdriver in there, you push it to open and then it just pulls out. It's a damn sight easier I must say than those old Seiko 5 bracelets. They were awful. I remember wrestling with those, breaking screwdrivers, breaking links, just having a disaster of a time. These are much, much easier. Doesn't mean to say they're much, much better on wrist though. It's still a hair nipper. Perhaps not quite as bad as some others though. But let's not worry about that for now. Let's have a look at the dial and hands and I will slip a little bit of macro in here as appropriate. As discussed, pretty much identical to the original from the 1970s. As such, everything's just printed on. The Q, the Timex and the Quartz. Timex now very proud of this emerging range of Q-branded reissues. The handset, big blocky square edged just as they were. Two-tone blue, so a dark blue in the centre of the dial and a paler blue on the chapter ring with the minute markers around the outer edges. Day-date complication as with the original. Not quite colour matched but not too bad. Black with white markings printed on them for the day and the date and that signature red second hand. If anything, it's the red second hand that appears the most mysterious, the most enigmatic. That's the hand that seems to float over the dial more than all of the others. Overall then, dial and hands, true to the original and still pretty good looking today. You can't ask an awful lot more of them than that. Now on wrist, vintage styling, vintage sizing but it's actually got a little bit of meat to it. I think perhaps because it's 13mm thick and it has that big piece of acrylic, it doesn't look or feel particularly dainty on wrist, even though that very short lug to lug and fairly small diameter dimension suggests that it is a smaller than average watch. However, the bracelet. I couldn't wear this bracelet long term because it's already taken off four or five of my arm hairs. I had a good go at taking off four or five of my arm hairs just filming this sequence. I think it's such a terrible shame when you pay good money, I mean significant money for a big brand watch and you're basically having to put the bracelet in the bin. Anyway, this is turning into the Mosey-Niggles section and we're not quite there yet but on wrist, yeah, looks good but doesn't feel good. Overhead legibility is okay though I guess by virtue of the fact that it does have those white tips to the two main hands and the red floating second hand. Not a big watch but you can see the time. Flip side of that though is there aren't any hour markers and the minute markers are not all that distinct, particularly the five minute markers so that you don't even have a kind of surrogate hour markers in that sense. So as long as you know roughly what's going on, you'll be able to tell the time without too much difficulty. Alright, Mones and Niggles, you know where this one is going already but before we get there, no lume. I know the original didn't have any lume but why didn't they put lume on those two little tips? It would have been so easy and so covert. Nobody would have noticed that they'd done it but they would have added a bit of extra utility after dark and then the bracelet. Yeah, like I said, I couldn't wear this watch on this bracelet which is a real shame. There is of course a simple solution to that and that is of course that you put it on literally any 20mm lug width strap that you happen to have in the house. This is my kind of preferred style. Brown I think goes nicely with the blue and the cross-stitch leather adds to the vintage appeal or mesh. It looks good on a mesh and you get to take advantage of the reasonable 50m of water resistance if you put it on one of these. I reckon it would also look great on one of those bonk lip style bracelets if you happen to have one of those lying around the house but it always stings a little bit having to dump the original bracelet. You wonder why they bothered putting something so inadequate on this watch in the first place. And the unusable bracelet just adds another question mark to this watch as a value proposition. Look, they're clearly selling a tonne of them at the current RRPs if Watch Direct are anything to go by but I might be tempted to go for one of the 1975 Marmont reissues. Same case, same crystal, same movement but a hundred dollars cheaper with a usable leather strap instead. But despite my complaints it is still an undeniably fun and undeniably stylish and that for well under $200 is not going to break the bank if you can see something like this fitting into your collection. So there you have it. This one, a little bit niche perhaps, you really need to be into the whole quartz reissue with acrylic crystal thing but assuming you are, the watch head is a cracker. If only I could say the same about the bracelet. Well done for making it all the way to the end of the video. If you are indeed into the whole quartz reissue with acrylic thing, check out another couple of Timex's. They seem to be the masters of it at the moment. Thanks for watching this one. I'll see you in the next one.