Seiko Men’s Prospex Arnie Japanese Quartz Watch

Watched stopped working after less than one week of use. Won’t recharge.
I love this how this watch looks but I can’t get the watch to work. I think the solar battery is drained but I’ve only had the watch for a week! After not even one week of wear the watch completely shut down. I have spent several hours in the sun with the watch on my wrist, I’ve left it by a window sill for days, and I’ve left it under a fluorescent light at night. It shouldn’t take this long to get the battery to charge. Seller is telling me to take the watch to Seiko. Do yourself a favor a spend a few dollars more and buy this watch from a reputable seller.

Japan Seiko is the only way to go
I’ve been using Seiko dive watches since 1975 when I got my first one as a birthday present, never had any problems until I bought this one 15Jan. ‘21. The only issue I’ve had was needing to know how many days in the month to keep the date set. So when I saw a Seiko watch that was programmed to keep the date I got it, even though it wasn’t made in Japan. Lesson learned, it worked for eight months and then the analog hands could not be synced with the digital time. The digital date and time was correct but the hands wouldn’t work. It was sent back to Seiko last week, hoping it can be repaired or I can find one made in Japan.

The watch reset under the sunlight
This model has a manufacturing defect, the watch reset to the factory settings every time it is exposed to sunlight

Great features with one curious design flaw
I own several of these watches – these are my daily outdoor work watch. If you like the analog side of time keeping, but occasionally need or want a bit of digital spice (stopwatch for ex), this is a great option. It’s a clever watch to set the time (you set the digital time, the analog hands automatically move to match). The watch is large in size, but it fairly light so it wears well. The design flaw is the combination of nicely lumed hands that are basically useless at night. The watch, even with excellent battery power capacity, goes into a power savings mode when in low to no-light settings (and no pusher activity has been recorded for a few hours) as would be encountered overnight when lume would be needed. In this power saving mode, the analog hands freeze and do not indicate accurate time. As soon as any light is detected, or any of the pushers is activated, the analog hands automatically return to the correct time positions, matching the correct digital time that continues unaltered. So at night, the lumed analog hands are likely to be inaccurate if they go into power savings mode. If your pusher crowns are locked down you won’t be able to exit the power saving mode unless you turn a light on. Who thought of this? It’s good for power savings, but perhaps it shouldn’t be triggered unless there is something like 48 hrs of low light conditions? Well, there is such a feature in this watch. After prolonged (days) low light exposure the watch goes into “sleep” mode. That’s basically the same (almost identical) to the power saving mode). Why have both? The “sleep” mode is valuable, the power saving mode (invoked by normal human sleep patterns) is not — basically an annoyance, and honestly a stupid design because to overcome it you need to keep at least one pusher crown in the unscrewed position that will impair water resistance qualities if you don’t routinely remember to screw it down when engaged in normal daily activities around water. Lastly the digital “screen” is slated to have a useful life span of about 7 years. After that it becomes dim and needs to be replaced (for a fee). So there are a few “issues” with this watch that is otherwise very simple to operate and offers the best of both analog and digital worlds.

Non credo ci sia bisogno di ribadire la qualità e l’ottima fattura degli orologi Seiko. Mi limito quindi a sottolineare quanto questo orologio sia simile al suo predecessore degli anni ’80 e quanto sia piacevole indossarlo nonostante le dimensioni ragguardevoli.

カッコいいです