Orient Star Just Made One of the Best-Looking Affordable Watches of the Year

1 min readOrient Star has been making watches since 1951, but for its 75th anniversary it has done something slightly different: removed one of the features that has defined its watches for three decades.The new Sakigake Three Hand does away with the power-reserve indicator that has appeared on Orient Star dials since 1996. It loses the date, too. What remains is an unusually clean, handsome everyday automatic that feels like a significant change of direction for the Japanese brand.Orient.Better still, it comes in at 38.7mm, with a 316L stainless-steel case and newly designed bracelet. The sunburst dial gets faceted, petal-shaped hour markers and skeletonized hands, while the four colors are gold, silver, light blue, and copper. The latter is limited to 900 pieces.Inside is Orient Star's new in-house F7542 automatic movement, offering more than 50 hours of power reserve. There's a sapphire crystal front and back, 100 meters of water resistance, and a properly useful screw-down crown.The light-blue model costs €880, or just under $1,000, while the copper-dial limited edition is €960 (about $1,088). It’s quite a lot of watch here for the money. And that ice-blue dial? Very tasty indeed.orientwatch.co.uk