There Are Pandas, and Then There Are Pandas.
And this isn't either of them! The Pandas we're talking about here, are watches, not bears. And what got me thinking about them (again) was a link posted this morning by @cm.rook who pointed a few of us to the very attractive (and not terribly priced) Yema "Rallygraph" Panda which, in it's most traditional arrangement, looks like the one on the left, but can also be had in the version on the right: The model on the left is a true Panda, while the model on the right is called a reverse Panda. The reason for that distinction is clear--Panda bears, only come in the first arrangement. Now at this point, everyone should be thinking about the most well-know Panda, The Rolex Panda, which is actually a Daytona, and among Rolex Daytonas, the most famous of which is the Paul Newman Daytona, which was famous first, because it was Paul's, and second because it sold at auction for $17.8 million (US Dollars). The story of that auction is well-known so I'll only...
Nov 8, 2019
After some research I came to the conclusion that it might be some sort of spin-off of an Orient Star series of watches from circa 2005-2015 that riffed on the theme of "retrofuturism," which is a thing, vd. Wikipedia. The watches in the series were quite wacky, and eventually the camera model grew on me, inspired by 1950s German Leica and Zeiss camera lenses, complete with bezel seconds presented as faux f-stop numbers and an aperture blade pattern embossed on the face.
The watch is a diver of sorts, in that the bezel rotates (counterlockwise, 60 ticks) and it's rated for 100 m, but the crown is not screw down, so I'm not sure I'd want to test it in the water. The open heart on the camera watch does show the balance wheel, and there are two non-date date windows, whose purpose is to show the rotation of the stem and the gear it engages when you hand wind (automatic, hacking, hand windable), as well as a narrow circular band around the face open to the innerds. There is an exhibition back, the glass of which is curved cyllindrically to match your arm, as is the entire watch back. The hands look black with lume in the middle, but the "black" glows a brilliant emerald blue if hit by the light at a particular angle. The complications are a retrograde power reserve indicator and the seconds.
I put it on a Radon NATO because the bracelet was too small for me. There were several colorways of this watch, and I plan to get a black version, at which point I can combine the links to build one full bracelet to use on my not-that-big wrist (Japanese wrists are small).