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
An imperfect analogy, but when I used to backpack in the mountains you needed a headlamp. In general, in an above-the-timberline area, you want the dimmest headlamp, since you just need a little help when the moon is not around. You don't want to blast out your night vision completely because you needed to look back and forth between places you lit up and the rest of the landscape. But all the headlamps only advertised how they were so much brighter than the competition, not whether their level of illumination was appropriate.
Of course, what good is a lume discussion without lume shots! The outer watches are Seikos (Alpinist on the left, SKX on the right). The inner watches are T100 (left) and T25 tritium. The first picture was taken right after charging the Seiko lume with an LED flashlight for several minutes. The second picture was taken 30 minutes later, Nothing beats T100 for all night brightness and readability. Seiko has great lume, but it didn't last. Perhaps if the Seikos were in full sunlight all day they would last longer, but they started out brighter than the tritium. But it's not how you start, it's how you finish.