Replica watch

With a lot of fakes being featured in the news and social media, I thought why not have a feature on a fake. Only, this fake is termed as a 'replica' by those who would like to twist the words or perhaps are too proud to admit this.

I got this watch during a trip to Dalian, China. Our group was going around the city during our free time while attending a conference and we chanced upon not a few shops selling what we knew were bootleg watches. Curious about the watches and why a lot of what appeared to be tourists looking at the watches, we decided to take a look ourselves. We ended up getting some as souvenirs (just for fun). One friend even asked for the 'higher quality' replicas of a luxury brand he fancied.

If you weren't an expert, a collector or familiar with luxury brand watches and the features of genuine specimens, would you suspect this was not the real thing?

This is supposed to be a replica of an Omega Speedmaster automatic watch with calendar, day and date features. The tachymeter doesn't work unless you deliberately wait for the second hand to be at the 12 o'clock position for each run.

The makers of this watch did a decent enough job trying to replicate the Speedmaster emblem embossed at the back of the watch.

Even the bracelet is made to appear as an Omega

Here's the dial bearing Greek letter

Technically, this is not a fake watch as it is very much real. It is functional and gives good time as well as has having desirable features like it being automatic (I haven't determined how long it will run on a full charge but it will not stop if you wear it during your typical day and leave it on the table overnight until the next use.), waterproof (we submerged our watches in our hotel room's tub as we had some fun with it) and having a scratch-proof glass face (we tried scratching it with a knife and later a paper cutter to no avail). It's only sin is its claiming to be an luxury brand watch. I keep the watch as a memento from that trip to China and do wear it once in a while. It's a bit heavy compared to the usual watches I wear (I prefer my Seiko Kinetic Titanium or one of my Swatches depending on my mood.).

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