Rep Vs Gen

[panermaniac]

How did I know we would run into one of those "I took my rep to the AD and they didn't spot it" stories...

more like one of those "I took my rep to the completely wrong AD and they didn't spot it" stories...

Here in Taiwan there are companies that make replica Brembo brake calipers. I'm sure if I took them to a Honda dealership, they wouldn't know the difference. Apples and oranges, mate.

Try taking your U-Boat to a U-Boat AD and see what happens. Dare ya!

and thanks to w0lf for keepin it real!

[poretl]

I never said I would be able to fool a Panerai AD that a rep is a gen. You can put as many words in my mouth as you want and try to prove me wrong so you look good but why don't you try to give a smart reply to what I'm actually saying? Dare ya!, as you likes to say.

You are implying I said something while I said something else. Maybe similar but not the same. Much like your gen Pan and my Rep. Very similar but not the same. Still, $9000 price differential.

And by the way, this is exactly why I didn't take my watch to a U-Boat AD, this is why I did not call U-Boat for help and this is why I asked the dealer in the mall if they carry U-Boat before I asked about my "U-Boat". That being said, my point remains valid.

Edited December 31, 2011 by poretl

[lfovco]

I agree with that statement 100%, no one cares. I wear my 2005 Eddie Lee Pam 111 with only mods being crown and the crown guard. By today's reps standards it is super innacurate. Guess what, where I live I bump into people wearing Panerais almost every week. No one cares, no one ever called me out, many of them looked at the watch and there was never a glimpse of a doubt. I let people handle it purposely and no one had a doubt for even split second. So I think no one cares. Only those that are into reps like us, but I never run into anyone in person yet.

It took me several secs...I didnt count.

These new Pams are really very good...excellent In fact. But there will always be some little flaw...always.

99.99999999% of the people you will bump into In real life situations will not have a clue...or probably care.

Now If a person Is going try to convince someone who knows a thing or three about watches...that It's the genuine article......well.

Mike

Edited December 31, 2011 by lfovco

[panermaniac]

I'm not sure anyone here actually knows what your point is.

I am fairly new to this hobby so I'm pretty sure that a great rep could probably fool me if I wasn't given anything to compare it with.

But, and this is a big BUT, you have to realize that some of the members here are incredibly knowledgeable about certain models (more so than some ADs, that's for sure)

I think it's definitely easier to spot tells on a movement rather than a dial. Movement have always been harder to rep than dials. imho

You have to concede that there are people out there that could very easily spot a rep at a glance. Not every model of every manufacturer of course, that is an unreal expectation. But for many people, watches are their passion and they are obsessed about a certain brand or model and know virtually everything about it. Is that so hard for you to comprehend?

Back to your "point", if you don't think that it's possible to spot a rep in under a second, why not give your U-Boat to Italo Fontana and see what happens?

Edited December 31, 2011 by panermaniac

[maxman]

I agree........

[Sweattdogg]

Comment #3: A couple of months ago, while I was changing the strap on my rep U-Boat, I lost one screw. Went to a couple of generic repair shops and all I got for a reply was 'this is so unique, I guarantee you you won't find it anywhere'. I ended up taking the watch at a store in the mall that sells expensive watches. Tag Heuer, Panerai, Hublot etc. I asked 'do you have U-Boat?". One guy said no but he held up the watch after I told him what my problem was and he ended up giving it to another guy. Mid 50s. He held the watch, he looked at it front back, turned it around a couple of time and he said something like "That's a big watch, nice!". He then went on the side and sat on his desk and looked at it under the loupe to see what screw that was. And while he was playingthere with the watch he said "I may be able to get a screw like that but it will be silver. But then it won't look good. Your best bet is to contact the manufacturer, is it still under warranty?" and the convesation continued. At some point I even said I paid $4700 for it, too. He even tried to find U-Boat's phone number to help me but he finally couldn't get it. And this whole thing took place not in the dark. Plenty of light. The guys is a guy who kbnows what an expnsive watch looks like. He sees them, he touches them, he repairs them. Of course I didn't ask him to check it and double check it if it was real but he surely even looked at it unde the loupe (at least part of it). And it never occured to him it may be fake. Now you can see where I'm coming from when I say I don't buy the "I can spot anything in uder 1 sec and not only that but in the dark too!" theory.

Your best bet to get a replacement screw is to contact one of our dealers. As far as spotting the rep you are posting on a rep website with many members who are very experienced. They will be able to spot a fake very fast. Most people on the street will not have these skills. No rep watch no matter how good will fool everyone all the time. I generally buy a rep and if I like it enough will save up and buy the real deal. Stay on these boards long enough and you will be the one picking out the flaws.

[poretl]

Your best bet to get a replacement screw is to contact one of our dealers. As far as spotting the rep you are posting on a rep website with many members who are very experienced. They will be able to spot a fake very fast. Most people on the street will not have these skills. No rep watch no matter how good will fool everyone all the time. I generally buy a rep and if I like it enough will save up and buy the real deal. Stay on these boards long enough and you will be the one picking out the flaws.

I personally have no desire to convince anyone a rep is a genuine watch. And I know this will never be an issue in real life when you wear it. I may give my watches to friends to look at etc but my friends would already know a watch is a rep not because they could spot it but because I would tell them. We pay tons of money to buy expensive gen watches because usually with high price comes high quality. And personally this is the only thing that concerns me. By making sure I get a watch that's 99.9% close to the rep you know what that means? Not that I can walk into ADs shops around town and fool them but it only means that I get to weat a watch of pretty much the same quality as the real one. And that feels good. The quality feels good not the illusion that my watch can fool an AD. This is what satisfies me. I would be the same satisfied if the watch was of the exact same quality, say, as a Panerai but it was not Panerai. These guys who make the rep try REALLY hard to come as close to the gen as possible. That means indirectly they are increasing more and more the quality. And this is what I like. That I can wear a watch of super high quality. As far as my U-Boat I have to tell you. When I wear that watch it truly feels I wear a 1 milliin bucks watch. I really mean it. Or rather I really feel it. This is all that matters to me. Now that the dealer could not spot it the only pleasure I get out of it is just a confirmation that the watch is indeed of high quality, NOT that the watch is identical to the real(for one thing, he probably never saw the real one) That, I don't care for. IN FACT, that watch does not look exactly like any real watch I've seen. The facrtory improvised and put a silver bezel on a black case which I have not seen in any gen picture. But get this. This (non-gen) look, I like so much better than any of the real ones.

As far as the screw, thanks for the tip. You are right. I turned the world upside down for that screw and I could not get anywhere. I had to talk to one of the dealers here.

Edited January 1, 2012 by poretl

[projectologist]

IF the Panerai rep has a display case back, then it's less than a second to spot a fake manual-wind movement. None so far have the correct looking Inca-bloc regulator/shock system. Sticks out like a sore thumb.

[poretl]

If a Panerai rep has a display case back, then it's less than a second to spot the fake movement. None so far have the correct looking Inca-bloc regulator/shock system.

do you have a pic, probably it has been created before, to show me exactly what that is? Like side by side to see exactly what five sit way in less than a sec? Perhaps it was discussed in another thread in the past?

[projectologist]

The notch is missing the one of the openings in the insert ring around the Inca-bloc shock system at the base of the dagger regulator arm. You can see it in the comparo pic in your OP.

[poretl]

The notch is missing the one of the openings in the insert ring around the Inca-bloc shock system at the base of the dagger regulator arm. You can see it in the comparo pic in your OP.

Is this the best (in therms of closeness to gen) there is to date?

http://www.kuvarsitwatch.com/index.php?dispatch=products.view&product_id=31298

[projectologist]

do you have a pic, probably it has been created before, to show me exactly what that is? Like side by side to see exactly what five sit way in less than a sec? Perhaps it was discussed in another thread in the past?

Red arrow pointing to the notched cut out I'm referring to. On the rep the cut out is always straight.

[poretl]

oh I see. How about the circle I drew on the gen one. There seems to be a red (screw?) ans a smaller silver screw next to the blue one. On the rep you can't see those.

[torobravo]

Pictures are very bad, but it took me less than a second that the better one is on the left.

[Sweattdogg]

If you are interested in quality go Seiko. My black monster has tons. Bottom line is with a rep you are buying something made in china with little to no quality control.

[poretl]

If you are interested in quality go Seiko. My black monster has tons. Bottom line is with a rep you are buying something made in china with little to no quality control.

not true. The rep industry is much like any other. You have to try hard to produce results in order to survive and to thrive. Think about this. Their best customers and their biggest chunk of revenue coms from returning customers and from referrals from other satisfied customers. And who are they competing against? Top watchmakers who put out there some super quality watches. The bar is already set extremely high for them. When you give the Chinese money and show them how (here comes the copying part) they can too produce quality. Chinese quality is identified with sh1tty quality but the price we pay for the Chinese product is shitty too. Much like with food. Let me charge you $300/person for dinner and I know how to make a nice presentation too. You give me $5 I can barely cover the cost of the materials I'll use for your dinner. I bet you, if you give for your Panerai rep another $250 (making it total $500) these reps can easily exceed the quality of the gen. But there has to be a balance. In any case, the Chinese know they have to produce quality too (up to the extend that $250-300 allows). Noone is willing to pay $300-350 for a rep that's pure garbage. I know I don't. With $400 I can get a super authentic watch from a middle range manufacturer. And I'm not so sure if a Seiko is much better than a Breitling or Panerai rep.

[kingkaiser]

A few diff things. First, all seikos will have good quality control, unlike a number of our reps. Ask anyone who got an h fac panerai that was dead on arrival. That's why you pay for those instead of reps if you want quality.

Second, I (a relatively inexperienced member) can point out certain reps in one second, including the 005s/318/359 etc. anyone on this forum who has studied the reps will know how to tell the gen of that particular watch apart from the rep. I am not surprised that senior members could do that for a number of random watches. Unless modded, there are still no 1:1 reps, but there are loads of 99% reps. Enjoy them, but don't think you can get past that tiny percentage of the population that REALLY knows their watches.

[poretl]

quality and spotting it from the real one are 2 TOTALLY different things. Say I follow the exact same processes Panerai follows and create an exact same watch except the color of the lume but still of the same quality lume (the only thing different) anyone then will be able to tell the 'fake' from the real. Anyone. It's only a matter of being able to tell orange from green for example. Once you know what to look for you can spot it in under 1/10 of a secong. You don't need to be an expert in watches. Does that make the 'fake' a bad watch??? Of course not.

So don't forget. Quality, in the context above, is only in the sense of how well built something is and not how close to something else it is. Of course with reps the objective is not only to make the watch of high quality but to make it look identical to the gen but that's another story. Here we were comparing Seiko and Rep in terms of quality.

I'll put it in a different way to you. One pays $250 for a Pan rep. You know how much an Emporio Armani watch costs in the mall? $300+. Emporio Armani. EA watches are Mickey Wouse watches. Personally, if both were no-name watches I would use my money to buy the rep. Not the EA.

Edited January 1, 2012 by poretl

[rjjsausting]

Red arrow pointing to the notched cut out I'm referring to. On the rep the cut out is always straight.

The inca bloc is so easy to see once you know it. Even a newbie like myself can tell. I have yet to see a rep that has this copied properly. So to the OP's original question, one can say with a 100% certainty that it is a rep with or w/o a gen to compare it side by side. It seems like this would be an easy fix, not sure why it has not been addressed. Kinda like the lettering on the front. I don't know why they don't fix the "A". It would be simple and likely just an oversight that has never been corrected.

The other easy tell on this watch is the fact that the rep is a low beat movement (assuming the gen is only made as a highbeat, experts can chime in). You can see on the gold gear in the center that has fewer teeth. Of course they have highbeat rep movements which eliminates this tell.

[Sweattdogg]

not true. The rep industry is much like any other. You have to try hard to produce results in order to survive and to thrive. Think about this. Their best customers and their biggest chunk of revenue coms from returning customers and from referrals from other satisfied customers. And who are they competing against? Top watchmakers who put out there some super quality watches. The bar is already set extremely high for them. When you give the Chinese money and show them how (here comes the copying part) they can too produce quality. Chinese quality is identified with sh1tty quality but the price we pay for the Chinese product is shitty too. Much like with food. Let me charge you $300/person for dinner and I know how to make a nice presentation too. You give me $5 I can barely cover the cost of the materials I'll use for your dinner. I bet you, if you give for your Panerai rep another $250 (making it total $500) these reps can easily exceed the quality of the gen. But there has to be a balance. In any case, the Chinese know they have to produce quality too (up to the extend that $250-300 allows). Noone is willing to pay $300-350 for a rep that's pure garbage. I know I don't. With $400 I can get a super authentic watch from a middle range manufacturer. And I'm not so sure if a Seiko is much better than a Breitling or Panerai rep.

So your experience in the rep game is the 3 weeks you have on this website and a broken u-boat rep? Sounds like you have it all figured out.

[Watchmeister]

I actually subscribe to the theory that the Chinese factories will take a rep to whatever level makes the most sense economically. The best thing that ever happened to the rep industry was the factories catching on to the fact that a 1:1 can sell at a premium. And no I don't think the reps of the better watches will ever hold a candle to the gens. They may for our purposes but the quality of the materials, the machinery and its tolerances and the trained personnel using those materials will not be the same. You can make a rep pretty damn good but no one should kid themselves. All you have to do is go look at any gen eta based movement (other than the piece of crap PAM 318) and the amount of rework done to the movement. We may be able to improve a rep so that for our purposes it is equivalent but it ain't.

[poretl]

So your experience in the rep game is the 3 weeks you have on this website and a broken u-boat rep? Sounds like you have it all figured out.

It's business my friend. Business. Like any other business. You playing with your watches and me actually doing some serious business and understanding business at multiple levels all these years makes you no better to talk about the watch business. The watch business is first a business and then a watch business. It's a business where they have to invest heavily to produce what they produce. You think rep watches come to you just like that. Panerai themselves spend tons of money for R&D. From design to implementation to testing etc. Rep manufacturers have to do the same at the copying level. It's about investing and producing returns. It's a complicated game. Very complicated game no matter what you are doing. And if you indeed have more experience than me playing with watches then you should be the one to know the progress that has been made over the years. How did it happen, fell off the sky? If they didn't have pressure to produce better ans better watches they would settle where they were 5 years ago or 20 years afo where the Panarai logo on the caseback of a rep was a sticker!

So if YOU think that playing with your watches and your straps you have figured it all out maybe you should reconsider and understand the real world goes beyond straps and buckles.

Oh, and one more thing. I'm a consumer too. I happen to own a few gen watches. Not the $20 000 ones but own 3 watches of >$2000 and many over the years from $20-800. When I paid $2800 for a watchand when I look at that watch the amount is well justified. You can see and feel quality. I also owned over the years thousands of other items from cars, computers, furniture, phones, shoes, underware to nail clippers. By this time in my life I can tell quality from garbage. So yes, me having experience with one rep for over 3 years actually does put me in a position to understand if the product I got is of quality or if it's pure garbage. It may not match 100% the real, and a U-Boat person can spot it in under a sec, in the dark but this is absolutely irrelevant.

Edited January 1, 2012 by poretl

[Sweattdogg]

[

It's business my friend. Business. Like any other business. You playing with your watches and me actually doing some serious business and understanding business at multiple levels all these years makes you no better to talk about the watch business. The watch business is first a business and then a watch business. It's a business where they have to invest heavily to produce what they produce. You think rep watches come to you just like that. Panerai themselves spend tons of money for R&D. From design to implementation to testing etc. Rep manufacturers have to do the same at the copying level. It's about investing and producing returns. It's a complicated game. Very complicated game no matter what you are doing. And if you indeed have more experience than me playing with watches then you should be the one to know the progress that has been made over the years. How did it happen, fell off the sky? If they didn't have pressure to produce better ans better watches they would settle where they were 5 years ago or 20 years afo where the Panarai logo on the caseback of a rep was a sticker!

So if YOU think that playing with your watches and your straps you have figured it all out maybe you should reconsider and understand the real world goes beyond straps and buckles.

Oh, and one more thing. I'm a consumer too. I happen to own a few gen watches. Not the $20 000 ones but own 3 watches of >$2000 and many over the years from $20-800. When I paid $2800 for a watchand when I look at that watch the amount is well justified. You can see and feel quality. I also owned over the years thousands of other items from cars, computers, furniture, phones, shoes, underware to nail clippers. By this time in my life I can tell quality from garbage. So yes, me having experience with one rep for over 3 years actually does put me in a position to understand if the product I got is of quality or if it's pure garbage. It may not match 100% the real, and a U-Boat person can spot it in under a sec, in the dark but this is absolutely irrelevant.

And in all these years of business you have never heard the term "OEM"? I must know what business you are in as a backup in case my real career falls through. Until then I guess I will just be the guy playing with my watches.

[PhilFree]

[

And in all these years of business you have never heard the term "OEM"? I must know what business you are in as a backup in case my real career falls through. Until then I guess I will just be the guy playing with my watches.

I can't imagine anyone who is a business person has never heard the term OEM. I find it impossible unless their business is of an illegal sort like drugs.

[poretl]

very smart. Very classic. Not being able to reply directly to an argument and you have to reply to something that never happened, never been said. I have to tell you. You don't impress me at all. I'm not sure about others but you sure don't impress me. WTF exactly told you I never heard of OEM? All I asked was if it's ever possible for an OEM strap not to have the word Panerai on it. But once again, trying to be smart making comments on stuff you manufacture out of you butt. Easy. But only when you are talking to idiots. And let me say one more thing. What are you trting to prove exactly here? That you are a plain sucker? They give you garbage and you keep giving them your money as I understand you have millions of reps as opposed to me who only has one? You and I may be getting the same quality, the same garbage ans pay the same money for it but at least, and that's according to you, I have the illusion that I get quality. You, on the other hand, are fully aware you are getting garbage and not only you come back giving them your hard earned money (unless your mom gives it to you) but you go around bragging you have hundreds of them. And if you are so smart and want to reply again please reply to what I said. Not to what you would like me to have said.

And regarding what I said before, it's not so much the business experience I have as it is the common sense I have. You, on the other hand, may not know exactly what that is because you are blided by your shiny hundreds of reps. But I forgot. They're garbage. Oh, well. I'm confused.

Edited January 2, 2012 by poretl