This Bargain Breguet Alternative Is Impressive, Yet Flawed - Orient Bambino Sun and Moon Review
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It feels like sports watches are ten-a-penny at the moment, with seemingly every new microbrand offering the same ubiquitous dive watch configuration. A clicky bezel, a lumey dial, and a generic ETA/Sellita movement. However, one brand at the more affordable end market is gaining an equal appreciation for their dress watches, as well as their sportier models.
Orient Watches' “Bambino” line presents the discerning gentleman/woman with a more elevated, dressier offering. The collection includes a variety of polished-cased, leather-strapped options. From simple 3-handed models right through to this example; the Orient Bambino RA-AK0803Y10B, which takes a brave step into horology with a mechanical complication similar to the gorgeous £82,000 Breguet Hora Mundi...
Background
Despite now being part of the Seiko-Epson family, Orient is a distinct brand with its own history and in-house movements. Founder Shogoro Yoshida began importing watches to Japan in 1901. By the 1920s the business grew into Toyo Tokei Manufacturing - building clocks and fine mechanical gauges.
By 1934 they expanded into wristwatches and enjoyed an all too brief success. The Second World War, and the subsequent global economic crisis which followed, meant the business had to be mothballed. Happily, the dust covers were removed in 1951 and the newly rebranded Orient Watch Company was revived. Happily, they came full circle and were able to return to the original Toyo Tokei factory premises where they began making watches once more.
Orient Watch Company | Credit: Orient Watch USA
Relatively recently they joined the Seiko-Epsom group, where Orient have benefitted from their bigger brother’s experience - reducing movement size and improving tolerances to modernise their traditional Japanese “in-house” movements. Many current Orient watch owners are very pleased with how accurate their Orient timepieces are and the value for money they represent. As we’ve shared on BWC previously, Orient’s quality control certainly rivals, if not, betters Seiko in similar price ranges. So for all intents and purposes, we have a Japanese watch company with over 100 years of history, well-designed, independently made in-house movements, and all at a price which is affordable for most.
What I particularly like about Orient is that they don’t pretend to be something they’re not. Their pricing is very reasonable and the products compete with many microbrands several times more expensive. Their focus is on good-looking, attainably priced pieces, with interesting dial colours and decoration.
Orient Sun And Moon Review
The ever-expanding Bambino range offers many different variants – there are over 30 different models and colourways. The dressy collection includes Day/dates, sub seconds and even partially skeletonized dials allowing one to view the balance wheel and escapement.
There’s a little something for everyone in Orient’s dress watch line-up. A good example is reference RA-AK0803Y10B reviewed here. Described as the ‘Sun and Moon’ variant it offers central seconds, a day-of-the-week indicator at 10 o’clock, a date indicator at 3 o’clock, and most interestingly, this model’s most distinguishing feature - a day/night indicator at 5. This is a relatively rare complication in modern watch design. Often overshadowed by the similar-looking Moonphase display, “Le Jour/Nuit” complication as Breguet terms it, actually brings a little more to the table than its venerable cousin Moon.
At first glance, I’d assumed the day/night dial was simply a cheap way to make a dress watch look much more expensive than it is - a Moonphase needs to precisely track an entire month, with extremely intricate gearing. A day/night indicator is essentially just a 24-hour wheel bolted onto the motion work of the movement. However, upon wearing the Bambino for a day or two, I found myself really warming to it. Having owned Moonphases in the past, I must admit, even with a Jager Le-Coultre, the enjoyment of revealing the full moon is a very slow burn.
The day/night indicator on the other hand is, well, night and day in contrast! A constant delight. With the smiley sun, moon, stars and blue skies greeting you at different times of the day, you can enjoy 60 celestial zeniths in the same time as a single lunar cycle - one could argue that's far better value for money.
Date Setting
In addition to the pleasant surprise of the ever-changing microscopic artwork, I also found a very practical benefit when setting the date; Most watches with date displays, regardless of their price point, only show a 12-hour scale. Which means, for all intents and purposes, 12 midnight looks identical to 12 noon. This makes setting the time to correctly change the date at midnight, rather than at lunchtime, a bit of a fiddle.
With a day/night indicator, you can actually see which phase the watch is in, allowing you to quick-change the date and time with far fewer twiddles of the crown. It’s a small win, but a win nevertheless and take it from me; it is vastly more enjoyable than trying to figure out if your moon phase is in the 26th or 27th day of waning!
Day Indicator
Night Indicator
The sun and moon images are a shiny gold colour, with a smattering of tiny stars catching the light nicely. Look closely and you’ll see the sun and moon have smiling faces engraved into them. In addition to the rotating moon / sun disc, the display also has a subtle radial guilloche finish to the masked section of the dial and a silver ring skirting the edge finishes the day/night display nicely. It’s these little touches in watch design which I enjoy – Orient didn’t need to add that polished silver ring, but they did it anyway, for us to enjoy. Two silver screws pin the day/night disc in place and are joined by silver Roman numerals and a silver applied Orient Logo on the dial.
Dial Design
The dial is a solid cream colour - successfully fooling my in-laws into thinking the watch was vintage, and bringing warmth to the overall visual. Building on the vintage vibe are shiny blue hands. Traditionally this effect was achieved through very precise temperature controlled baking of the hands at a specific temperature, resulting in ‘heat-blued’ steel. However, Orient’s blued hands are suspiciously vibrant, and a glance at the underside of the hands betrays this as staining or painted finish, rather than true heat-bluing. It’s still a nice touch and helps to elevate the piece and bring yet more interest for the eye to gaze upon.
The Week-Day indicator at 10 is simple but effective, listing the weekdays around the circumference of a circular cut-out, with a pointer indicating the current day. Very fine circular guilloché is used to add decoration. The pointer doesn't sweep, but rather, it jumps to a new day between midnight and 3 am, another nice touch.
The Date indicator at 3 is pretty good, with a solid spring forward at dead on midnight. Lesser movements will slowly roll the date forward over the course of 2-3 hours and if you make the mistake of checking the date at 1 am you may be quite confused with what you see. Not so with Orient's movements. The date window is not a simple cut-out, either. It includes a multi-stepped recess which adds interest and again, elevates the dial more than the price-point would require. These are the types of finer detail where you can really appreciate the care, attention and subsequent value in an Orient watch.
Dial Markers
It took me a while to spot a few of the interesting details in the Roman numerals around the dial. For those who haven’t spotted it yet, there are in fact only numerals on the even hour positions of this model, stick markers hide in plain sight for the odd hours. Getting really nerdy, you may also see the 4 o’clock is not an "IV" but "IIII" instead - as has been watch and clock making tradition for several hundred years and helps to keep the dial symmetry. Diving even deeper still, Orient have gone to the effort of shaving a small sliver off the lower baton of the 4th digit at 4 oclock, in order to facilitate the day/night cut-out. Another example of Orient going the extra mile and understanding that details matter.
Skirting the exterior of the dial is a crisp, black, printed minutes track and an additional 1/3rd of a second track, with Arabic indicators at 5-second intervals. The tracks bring some definition to the extremities of the dial and act as successful punctuation for the creamy dial.
Case Construction
The stainless steel case is the classic Bambino shape with polished, conical bezel and polished lug tops and bottoms. Case sides are finely brushed. The lugs angle down a little for comfort and are relatively short, making this watch comfortably wearable on my 6.5” wrist and could be worn on a 6” wrist without overhang, depending on wrist shape.
The large, rounded crown crown has the Orient logo etched into it and is well-proportioned. It is not a screw-down crown and has a minimal water resistance of 3bar / 30 metres. This is ok to wash your hands, or to take a splash of rain, but not a piece you'd want to be submerging, and given the leather strap, you'll probably want to take it off for showering too.
In the front we have a boxy Saphire crystal, offering good visibility and enhanced scratch resistance. With the lighter colour of this dial, I didn’t notice much glare and the dark blue hands are easily readable in most lights. Being a dress watch, there’s nothing as vulgar as luminescence to spoil the mood on this dial.
Watch Movement
In the back we are treated to a mineral glass display caseback, revealing the F6B24 in-house movement with 22 jewels and approximately 40hrs of power reserve.
These movements are genuinely made in-house by Orient in Japan. Perhaps not as highly finished or decorated as many Swiss 'in-house' movements, but they are still technically an in-house movement, meaning Orient have full control over the materials, tolerances and quality control of their movements.
What I didn’t like
The cream dial and faux-blued hands were a bit too contrived. Owning a couple of vintage pieces from the 50s, which I picked up for similar money to this Bambino, it would be hard to tempt me to swap them for this modern interpretation. Even though I am under no illusion that this will require far less care and service costs to keep it running well for years to come. If I am to wear a watch with a creamy dial and blued hands, I'd like the creaminess to have slowly developed over decades of sunny summers, and the hands to have been skillfully blued in a kiln, 70 years ago.
The 20mm brown faux alligator leather strap includes a pin-buckle, engraved with Orient. Turning it over, the lining proudly confirms its genuine leather status, but I’m not sure the rest of the strap can make the same claim. There are a few corners and very thin sections of ‘alligator’ on the inside of the strap which poked into the skin quite sharply at times. Based on a plastic-on-plastic squeak, I strongly suspect this may be a genuine leather inner, with a pleather alligator embossed exterior. From a distance, it looks the business, but I think this might have been one of the few areas where Orient may have cut some corners. You might want to look at a nice, full leather strap to accompany this watch at some point down the line.
Size-wise, given the relatively thin bezels, dress watches tend to wear larger than the equivalent sports watches of the same case diameter. So this 40.5mm dress watch felt too large for my eyes. Arguably the case sat well on my wrist, but the large dial opening paired with the vintage colours and hands was a little jarring for me.
The nomenclature and naming conventions of Orient's collections utterly baffle me – indeed, I think it even gives Orient a headache sometimes. Not only do they use relatively unintuitive alpha-numerics for their references, but they also introduce “version numbers” for newer releases of similar models. So the Bambino Day / Night, has versions: 1 (which I can’t find much info on), Version 2 as tested, plus later Versions 3, 4 and 5. It seems at least 4 versions are current and available in their catalogue. So if you're interested in this model, be sure to check around a few sites and pay attention to the dials as there are subtle nuanced differences between each version.
Alternatives
There are several variations of the day/night bambino on offer – The version 3 RA-AK 0010B10b offers an elevated, fully painted Roman numeral dial and a panoramic date window, version 4 RA-AK0002S10A is similar to version 3 but with painted Arabic numerals, and version 5 RA-AK0307B10B is a bit sportier and uses stick batons rather than the roman numerals and is available on a steel bracelet – this is the pick of the bunch in my view.
Personally, with a slightly smaller-than-average wrist, I think I’d be willing to drop the day/night complication and opt for a more classic, less complicated Bambino 38mm (RA-AC0M02B) as a dress watch.
Beyond Orient, but keeping it in the family, Seiko have many classic dress watches on offer. If you're feeling brave, the pre-owned vintage market is full of small, creamy dialled Swiss delicacies in this price range. Vintage pieces can be a bit of a minefield, but if you find a reputable seller, and you are prepared for far more maintenance and upkeep than a modern watch, there are some lovely dress watches to be had out there.
Final Thoughts
In summary, this watch was much more interesting than I had imagined, and I can certainly understand why Orient have such a cult following. The modest pricing, decent build quality and Japanese attention to design detail were impressive. I am not a fan of the yellowy cream dial, it was a little too in your face and could have been toned down a Pantone or two. But with seven different case and dial combinations to choose from, including pink gold coloured cases, black and white variants, this gripe is purely subjective.
Despite sharing a handsome complication in common, it would be quite a stretch to call this a bargain Breguet, but the Orient Bambino Day/Night does represent very solid value for money, with nice attention to detail and an unusual complication to boot. It deserves to be recognised as a great quality bargain nonetheless.