cougar1

A bit of rodico is great Vandal for removing any prints or dust if you plan to take the caseback off. I can't see any prints on the movement though

Nice pickups! Both watches look great, the Luminox has you sorted for when you are in stealth mode Also the Certina is a very nice everyday wearer, I'm beginning to take more notice of Certina lately, in the past few years they have stepped up a gear and are producing some very nice stuff these days.

It looks great Ryan, agree with you the gen bezels are ridiculously priced, not worth it unless you can pick one up 2nd hand.... They've gone up retail since last summer when they were about £170 back then in cousinsuk. I can't even imagine what parts for the newest ceramic PO 8500 would be like if we got to the stage of a good base case for a franken. It'd probably be 500 quid for a dial and 400 for the ceramic bezel. I think we are in the golden age of franken PO's ...the new one would probably be way too expensive to franken....it's all still speculation at this stage anyway.

Excellent review again vandal, and great pics, you have a talent for these reviews

Yeah, it's hard going, the thing that amazes me is the average joe on the street doesn't give a crap what these guys are wearing or how much it cost. The irony is that these rep haters have more in common ...i.e. an interest in watches, with the 'enemy' than they do with the 99% of the couldn't care less, sub $200 watch wearing planet. Yet they can't see it, or refuse to. Bloody silly really!

Great review and excellent photography Vandal, enjoy the watch.

I hope you are not referring to me as being one of the egos? Not that I care really even if you are but not sure. I agree with you that there is nothing special at all about this thread, there are some phenomenal threads on the forum and in the Omega section, I have no idea why this is being referred to as a 'great thread'. My honest take on the situation is that it was a another 'tolis' thread that was going fast into the abyss and then a newb came in and asked a few decent questions early on...the kind of questions I would like answered if I was buying a first rep, you know ....'why would this movement be better than that?', and ....'what's with the price discrepancies?'....valid questions ...so I stuck with it. Why they can't use the search function I don't know but anyway, it just kept going for a while and all was well, just normal banter. Then it turned into a circus for no apparent reason, my no bulls*it take on the both of them is that Wetwork is a sh*tstirrer and gets off on pissing off people for fun, a troll if you like, and then phoband, oh phoband, seems to be one of the most sensitive people I've ever come across on the internet...a well respected and long standing member no doubt, but how he survives at all it beyond me...and here we are, nothing really happened, no laws were broken. Wetwork might have been a bit too pushy for his own good with his let me shove this watch around until somebody calls it out attitude. Both of them seem like children to me or they behave like it. I couldn't really give a sh*te if the thread is shut down. As said earlier in the thread the info is all available anyway on the forum, nothing new here. If I get a warning for my honest opinion so be it. btw Maxman if I picked you up wrongly on the 'ego' part of your post then my apologies. Edit: Vandal great review and great pictures.

Yep good points about the rep community flagging more scam watches on ebay than any of these uptight anti rep clowns could even comprehend. This has been discussed before and pointed out aswell, Here is another interesting thread....takes a while to get going and is long and it gets more heated but still some good arguments before it descends into the bowels of hell Here.... Read it if you want to kill an hour!

Pho, you need to calm down a bit, the beers are good advice, no point anyone getting wound up over stuff said on an internet forum, even if it's personal...life is too short and all that.

Congrats Vandal, they were a long time coming Both look great, look forward to reading the reviews. Believe me, your post above is not off-topic here on this thread....even though this is the Omega forum......compared to the stuff that has going on the past few pages here your photo is more than a welcome relief! Enjoy the watches

Wetwork, you may think this back and forth jibing is fantastic reading but it's not, sure it may get a little attention because it's a current thread, but when it's fallen down the page as it inevitably will and someday a newb is searching for information on a PO, then they will read and get bored immediately by non stop bickering and going off topic. It happens all the time, I see it myself on other forums when I might have hit good info I need on a thread, you find yourself reading avidly then bickering starts over nothing, and you find yourself scrolling to jump over it and eventually the thread falls off a cliff as no one will contribute anymore and you're left with a sense of 'well that wasn't worth the effort'. I'm not taking any sides, I have my own side on this, but I can tell you now wetwork that if this was any of the other rep fora you would be banned by now. The reps here are very patient and allow open discussion without over moderation and that is a good thing. It's upto the forumites to keep things ticking along as they should in order for forums to be useful and enjoyable to everyone. Edit: Right, I wrote the above before I saw your post above Wetwork, If we can keep it on topic from now on then all is good, I fear we went over the tipping point long ago however!

Yes same watch, the red colors issue is not noticeable, very subtle, not sure I should've even brought it up I would say the lume is much more noticeable comparitively. I was looking for a red numbered rep vs red numbered gen dial comparison pic to clarify...but can't find one, I'm sure theres one here or on the other forums somewhere, so many frankens made at this stage across the forums it was bound to be photographed. The one I meantioned earlier on Rymeisters thread is white vs red so not the same thing .....sorry. Don't have any fears about ordering the red version, it's a perfectly fine rep...the white is just more popular thats all.

I agree, I love watch designs, I've never been a 'brand' fan, even when I buy clothes I go out of my way to try to avoid logo'd stuff...or at the very least minimize them, it's much more subtle and discreet and less gaudy infact. I never get the argument from some on gen watch forums about, homages and sterile 'replicas' being the only way as an alternative to reps to satisfy the need for a particular design. To me, there are some good hommages but with many there is just something odd about the designs, sterile dials look flat and drab to me, it's nothing to do with the missing logo, it's just more that they lack balance and just don't look right. Also many hommages just don't capture the aesthetics of the gen close enough to be worth buying, they can be too big, or have some stupid design feature that throws the whole watch off balance. That ruins the design that you originally fell in love it. Reps are fantastic. If I really really want and love the gen I'd buy after a test run with the rep, but there are many watches I really like, but I don't love enough to part with 4 figures for. That's my 2c anyway .

I would hope so, there are plenty of anti rep brigade lunatics like that though. I actually thought that thread would've continued with a bit more input and useful argument but not so, it seemed to wane off, I guess many who would have valid argument don't get involved because eventually these type of discussions only go one way.

I agree, it would be quite a bit of work to concise it down into a readable thread at this stage but if someone is upto the task then great. Chopping it off might be better, I haven't read back through the whole disaster area yet, even that would take a bit of time. Any newbs reading would stay away from reps, probably thinking we have all lost the plot....thinking there must be something in the cheap chinese metal that's poisoning us

No difference Ade, both are the same except for the number colour, some people say the rep red numbers are not as 'bright and vibrant' as gen, and this is true...still a great rep though. You can get an idea of rep vs gen dial with red numbers from Rymeisters great thread somewhere below this Fair play to you for trying to keep this on topic but I think the thread has derailed and is threatening the adjacent nuclear power station at this stage.

Just to add separately, I honestly had absolutely no idea for years that there was a rule 25 ............I just thought it was basic common sense and more or less 'rep etiquette' that would be fairly obvious ..... I wouldn't say boring, this one has all the ingredients of waiting for a train crash about to happen... I will say that! If it hasn't already crashed...which I think it has, we are just waiting for the next express to plow into the current wreckage.

Tbh, at this stage, I would've liked this thread to continue in the hope that first time buyers might come back and maybe input their buying experience and maybe a few photos of their new acquisition, as Adeodatus said ....a sort of log of the experience of the whole process, but I'm afraid it's gone too far now, and I personally think the thread should probably be locked at this stage. That's up to the mods of course. Wetwork, I thank you for thanking me again, but I didn't do anything special (you had a lot of questions ) and if the early banter was a help to others too, then great. This forum has many people much more experienced than me so you would've got answers anyway, even if it was slow going earlier. The thread has gone far too off topic now to be a help to anyone! Pity!

That's brilliant work and a fantastic write-up and pics Ryan, great read, this sort of detail stuff is superb, love it

Yep maxman, tz-uk is not over moderated, and open discussion is allowed to a certain extent,....that is until the self proclaimed mods come in an start the whole 'fakes are for fake people' rubbish. Thankfully the forum has a few normal watch fans Just to follow on from above: ....Overall I wouldn't call it a tide turn but I do believe that more and more watch enthusiasts are looking or have already looked towards reps and see them differently than they would have say a 5 or 6 years ago. The old arguments about rep 'crap' vs precision Swiss craftsmanship are becoming undone when even the blind can see that the Swiss watch industry has been milking the 'precision craftsmanship' slogan for years now. Added to that, we know that reps these days are not quite what they used to be and this is filtering through to those watch fans who might not have taken notice a few years ago. Lots of people on gen forums are more than a little appalled these days by the 15%+ per annum increases on Swiss brands across the board and they have literally been completely priced out of brands that they might have loved just a few years ago. Of course there will always be the brand fanatics that can't abide reps regardless of how good they are in a side by side comparison to their pride and joy. It would wound them to admit they might have over-spent. It's the one's as seen from FxrAndy's quote above who liken the whole rep world to child trafficking or paedophilia are the very disturbing sort, god only knows where that such acidic hatred comes from, I can only assume that they may have been seriously ripped off in the past, even then it's a little over the top, imo!

First time I've read an even partly balanced opinion about reps in a gen forum. Of course the usual screamers come to the fore, but for once nice to see a thread where there is at least some discussion and even a little nod that reps are indeed a valid hobby. Not that anyone cares what they think but however, a few interesting opinions given. Don't think it will catch on though Here I found this quote particularly amusing!

Yep, will never be perfect to gen probably, but is very close, the option of swapping out the bezel is available as said above. The 42mm has better centred pearl out of the box than the 45mm, but they've both improved a great deal since previous PO reps.

tolis.....look at the trouble you started, who would've thought your innocent request for information would've created the 4th longest thread in the the history of rwg Omega forum. At this stage we don't know whether to give you an award or come over to your house and slap you

Wow that looks gorgeous now, great work, btw what strap is that?

Wow, there's some catalogue of stuff there, years of fun to be had with that lot! Good stuff!