Watch Review: Plazeon Chrono-Reserve
First of all, the technical specifications, taken from the Plazeon web site:
Specification:
Crystal: Sapphire crystal on both front and display case back
Case: 42mm Special cut 316L Stainless Steel brushed finishing
Movement: Manual wind Column Wheel Chronograph with specially designed Power Reserve Indicator
Water resistance: 30m
Straps: Carbon strap with orange stitching and Brown Genuine Alligator strap with white stitching
Buckle: Etching PLAZEON logo deployment buckle
Box: Big Teak Wood box manufactured by the factory that also produces boxes for top SWISS brands
Accessories: Screw driver for strap changing, micro-fiber cloth for polishing
Plazeon is a Thai company that has, as of this date, three models out on the market. The one under review here is the Chrono Power Reserve model. So, let’s take a brief look at the watch itself:
I think that the first thing that really stands out is, of course, the design of the watch. This is also what differentiates Plazeon from all other watches out there: this is not your generic Asian watch.
The design is very clean and uncluttered. It’s a bicompax layout, with the minutes totalize on the right-hand side of the watch and the running seconds on the left; the central seconds hand is to show when the chronograph function is up and running. The face, finished in a deep, non-reflective black with white markings, reflects a number of design influences: military, for one; minimalistic, for another; modern as well.
The military influences are, I think, clear: matt black face, heavy-duty case, markings where they are needed. This ties into the minimalist influences: there is only one number on the face for orientation (which is also lumed to aid in orientation in the dark). The modern influence is definitely the color choices involved: the use of orange for secondary, non-lumed elements is influenced by current color choices in a number of watches (Omega and Limes come immediately to mind).
What sets the watch apart from all others is the case design. This is a big case, 42mm, but it rides well on my fairly small wrist. The key design element of the case is, obviously, the chamfered bezel of the watch case, divided into 12 segments (like the hour gear), fixed. This slopes up to the flat sapphire of the crystal, which gives the front of the watch an elegant poise on the wrist: the watch is fairly high on the wrist, but really doesn’t look it. Hence the watch wears smaller than its 42mm size would indicate, but retains a massive presence while you are wearing it.
The case itself is made of 316L stainless steel, which is fairly robust and tough. While I wasn’t about to go and scratch the watch deliberately to see how it would handle scratches, this is the same stainless steel that goes into most stainless steel watches. The finish is a mixture of brushed stainless and polished, with the lugs and the front of the bezel brushed. The cutouts on the bezel are polished, providing a moderate and elegant contrast and breaking up the massiveness of the case nicely.
The crown carries the Plazeon logo, which is a stylized design from the column wheel mechanism of the chronograph movement. Movement is solid and smooth, with a clean ratchet from the winding position to the setting position. The crown is pleasingly massive, giving a good grip. The pushers are straight-forward and function perfectly, with no heavy-handed push necessary to start the chronograph function up.
The hand design is straightforward, baton for the minute and hour hands, as well as the two subdial hands and the power reserve hand. The center seconds hand is different, using a long, slim wedge shape to differentiate itself from the other hands. The length of the hands is, in my opinion, darn close to being perfect: The tip of the minute hand reaches the minute markings of the dial perfectly, while the hours hand is appropriately stubby, reaching almost exactly half the length of the minutes hand and allowing excellent and immediate differentiation of the two. While the two subdial hands and the power reserve hand are not luminous, I think that is the way they should be, rather than distracting the user at night with unneeded secondary lume. The first subdial, on the left for running seconds, lacks exact markings, with only 10-second markings, but as far as I am concerned that is okay, since if you need more exact timing, that’s why you have the chronograph function. Both subdials are very, very slightly recessed, again an elegant touch. The second subdial, a 30 minute totalizer – very true to tradition – has minute markings as are needed on this dial.
Readability is excellent, and you can easily tell the time from across the room during the day if the face is visible.
The power reserve indicator winds up when you wind up the watch and moves down very slowly over around 42 hours or so (that’s what this one managed on a full winding), my only complaint on the face is the power reserve curve, which while giving an indication of the volume of energy left, would have been better as a simple thin orange curve, rather than looking like a fang. There is a slight design discrepancy here: the base of the curve is straight but abuts the curve of the 30 minute totalizer. I’d have preferred a simple orange curve that matched the movement of the tip of the reserve indicator instead.
The face itself is a very nice, deep matt black color, with painted markings. The lume is unusual: there are two levels of lume on the face. The first, strong lume is on the hands, which is what one needs to see immediately in the dark to begin with: the weaker, secondary lume is on the face of the watch itself, giving detail, but not overwhelming the lume of the hands. Here is a photo of the lume effects:
The lume, however, is not nearly as bright as this photo would indicate, as I modified this photo to exaggerate the lume. The lume in general is adequate, but comes nowhere close to a Superluminova lume or the lume you might see in a Seiko. The two-level lume is, as far as I know, unique: most companies only apply a single level of lume, and I was quite surprised to see how nice the effect was when I woke up one night at around 3 AM and looked at the time, only to find two differing lume levels. The secondary lume on the face is perfectly adequate, but is really only noticeable when your eyes have become accustomed to the dark, receding nicely. The orange and red colors barely register at all at night, leaving you with a lovely, minimalist way of reading the time with no external light source.
Now let’s talk of the downsides of the face: I feel that the logo is just a tad too large, and that the accuracy of placing the 1 and 2 of the number 12 were just very, very slightly off: this is something that I noticed first after a few days of wearing the watch, so it may not be of relevance for most. Further, I’ve only had this one to look at, and it may have been overseen. It was, however, for me a distraction, drawing attention to the discrepancy.
Further, the case could use a slightly better level of finishing. The cutouts for the bezel could be better polished out: they show only a bit of machining, rather than being highly machined. If I understood correctly how the watch was made, the bezel and the cutouts are machined from a single piece of 316L: the cutouts are not circular, but rather angled, and it seems to be that the machining process could have been better done to perfectly polish out the cutouts to a higher level of finishing.
The case is only rated to 30 meters, which is, given the design goal, adequate. This means this is NOT a watch you wear while swimming and the like, and I wouldn’t shower with it, but it should be more than adequately protected from humidity and dust in all but the most severe environments.
So, what’s inside?
We have the Seagull ST19, engraved with the Plazeon name. According to the manufacturer, the entire watch is made by Seagull, but not using the usual Seagull case, instead using the case according to the design specified by Plazeon.
Some say that this is a rebuild of the Venus 175, which it certainly resembles, but I dare say that Seagull has modified and changed the Venus 175 movement with an eye to modern-day mass manufacturing methods. Let’s take a brief look at this heritage and what the Chinese have done with it. The Venus set of chronograph calibers was first introduced in 1935, patented under Swiss patent 159450 that was issued on 13 Jan 1933. By 1950 they were producing 5 different calibers, which over the next decade led to another 15 different calibers, ultimately leading to the predecessor of the Valjoux 7750, which is one of the most widely-used automatic chronograph calibers today.
However, Venus itself – more exactly the Ebauches-Fabrik Venus SA, based in Moutier, Switzerland – closed down business in 1966, a fairly early victim of the forces facing the Swiss watch industry: in this case, the increasing popularity of automatic calibers led fairly directly to the demise of the company.
The core of the design is a column-wheel mechanism that I won’t go into extensive detail here: suffice to say that the column-wheel mechanism provides a way of easily turning the timing mechanism on and off, i.e. adding or removing the additional gear train from the power train and resetting the mechanism back to zero.
The Seagull implementation of the ST19 has gotten mixed reviews: there are some who have very good results with watches using this movement, and then there are those who don’t. One consensus that appears to be emerging is that while the ST19 enjoys an excellent design and heritage, right now it is simply of uneven build quality. In the real world, this is manifested by widely different timing in different positions: leaving a watch with the ST19 face up for 4 hours might result, for instance, in a variance of +92s/day, but with face down it might be –16s/day, with other positions, such as crown up, crown down, 12 o’clock down, 12′o’clock up, etc. etc., being equally off.
Now, these all equal out so that this particular watch had a rather decent accuracy of around +12s/day when worn all day and night (except for showers), but the vastly differing timing of the different positions is, for me, disturbing. I’ve gone and asked the experts over at the Watchmaking forum of WUS as to what makes a watch calibre behave this way: the watch clearly shows gravitational effects, reflecting probably at least a lack of dynamic poising of the balance wheel, indicating that this calibre is indeed true to its heritage: watches with these calibers need to have the watch worked on, ideally adjusted in 6 positions to ensure that the gravitational effects are minimized.
Now, that would drive the cost of the watch up significantly, since a proper adjustment would need, at a minimum, at least two hours of watchmaker’s time (6-position timing, disassembly of balance wheel and truing checks, with static and dynamic poising of the balance, reassembly and re-checking of the 6 positions) and possibly much more, depending on the build quality of the watch.
And that is a topic of its own. Seagull provides the ST-19 with what appears to be Geneva stripes on the balance bridge and on the chrono bridge, but these aren’t really Geneva stripes, but are instead stamped into the surface, rather than being the result of polishing these parts of the movement with a wooden stylus and a special chalk mixture. Further, the blued screws are a tad too bright and the “wrong” shade of blue, pointing more likely to chemical bluing, rather than a heat-treated bluing process.
While both quibbles are admittedly pedantic, they raise some issues with the choice of movement. But that has nothing to do with the watch here in question: it has everything to do with the Chinese watch industry, which is outside of the scope of this watch review.
The build quality of the watch is fine, but I have a tiny quibble with the choice of a plastic retaining ring in conjunction with a very nice sapphire display back: you can see what it looks like here (sorry for the bad picture, but it was the only way to get it):
This is something I first noticed after looking at the watch for a few minutes: either using a black, rather than white, plastic retaining ring or switching to a metal one would be much nicer. As is, the retaining ring is excellent, giving the watch a strong “finished” feel with no slack or movement of the calibre inside, and this is more a cosmetic issue than anything else.
The watch was delivered with 2 straps and a changing tool. I didn’t get a chance to actually change the strap, but did investigate the mechanism: straight-forward and should be no problem. The retaining bars are screwed in, which is a rather nice level of finish that you usually don’t see on a watch in this price class. In addition, they are very nicely recessed, meaning that while they may collect some dirt, the screw heads are virtually impossible to damage. I did try to see how tight the screws had to be: a simple, solid hand-torquing of the screw head was more than adequate to ensure that the screws didn’t come loose.
The carbon band was very comfortable, but I did have problems with the butterfly clasp that was delivered with the watch, as you can see here:
While there’s not a problem with the build quality, I found that it tended to catch hairs in the assembly, which was annoying. The strap itself was very comfortable and most certainly of rather good quality, but the clasp, as I said, kept on catching hairs on my wrist and for that reason I didn’t like it that much. The logo on the clasp is nicely done, etched into the metal.
You can see the very nice build of the inside of the carbon band from the above picture: suffice to say that I wish all straps I owned were as nice as this quality. This is what the other strap looks like:
And here is the box set (forgot to get a picture of this: this is from their web site)…
So what is the verdict?
Using a scale from 1 to 100, with 100 being perfect and 1 being really bad, let’s look at how I assess this watch within its price category. Obviously I’m not going to compare this to a watch selling for five times as much, but want to give a fairly objective assessment of how I see the watch within this price category (chronograph under $1000).
Rating:
Design 30% 89.8
Case 25% 85
Face 30% 90
Hands 25% 100
Color 10% 100
Lume 10% 65
Wearability 30% 89.5
Strap 25% 85
Presence 30% 100
Fit 30% 90
Weight 15% 75
Movement 30% 49.2
Accuracy 75% 42.7
Finish 15% 65
Usability 10% 75
Presentation 10% 95.0
Box Quality 50% 100
Accessories 30% 100
Documents 20% 75
Total on a scale of 1 - 100: 78.0
I wish I could get this in a better table… 
What does this rating mean? For this price category, this is a very good rating. The only thing really keeping the watch from having a better rating are the issues I see with the movement, but I feel that there are too many issues right now with the accuracy of the movement. However, either you can live with the accuracy of the watch – which was adequate for this price class – or you can have your favorite qualified professional watchmaker work his or her magic on the movement and get it adjusted to 6 positions, which would change the movement rating from less than 50 points to something considerably higher.
This is my own rating system: the accuracy number is determined by comparing the acccuracy of the watch in three positions (face up, face down, crown down) and then the average accuracy over 10 days normal wearing, both day and night, removal for showers, taking the standard deviation of the former and comparing it to the observed accuracy with a weighting system for levels of accuracy.
I hope to see one on a Movado soon
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