So a few weeks ago I decided I was going to see how the lume on all my watches compares. And I thought some folks here might find the images interesting.
Here's what I did :
-- I put all of my watches together in a dark room.
-- I left them in the room with the light on, and a pretty wide beam LED flashlight setup to cover them all for a couple of hours
-- I setup my camera and tripod to take a photo every 10 minutes, and let it take images for about 4.5 hours
After that, I took the images and adjusted the set so that the brightest one looked approximately as bright as it did to my naked eye. I did not stay in the dark to let my eyes adjust - I just wanted some kind of standard to try to equalize the photos too. I also had a few frames that got very noisy due to the low light and length of time the camera was on. I could correct it some without affecting the lume, but couldn't fix it all, so some of the images look a little off or there's a bit of flicker. The lume brightness is pretty accurate though.
After that I assembled into an animated GIF, so it could be viewed as an animation. I'm pretty surprised how quickly lume fades. Basically, it all stinks compared to what I'd like it to do. But some obviously faded a lot faster than others.
The watches are, from left to right :
Some things I expected... The vintage Seiko pretty much dissappears right away, and the GO has very little lume and fades quickly as expected.
The Seiko 5 does well, and the Steinhart maybe not as well as I expected (the hands are good... the markers and bezel not as much).
The Epos did surprisingly well I think. And the Citizen was probably best overall, IMO, which also makes sense to me.
Here's what I did :
-- I put all of my watches together in a dark room.
-- I left them in the room with the light on, and a pretty wide beam LED flashlight setup to cover them all for a couple of hours
-- I setup my camera and tripod to take a photo every 10 minutes, and let it take images for about 4.5 hours
After that, I took the images and adjusted the set so that the brightest one looked approximately as bright as it did to my naked eye. I did not stay in the dark to let my eyes adjust - I just wanted some kind of standard to try to equalize the photos too. I also had a few frames that got very noisy due to the low light and length of time the camera was on. I could correct it some without affecting the lume, but couldn't fix it all, so some of the images look a little off or there's a bit of flicker. The lume brightness is pretty accurate though.
After that I assembled into an animated GIF, so it could be viewed as an animation. I'm pretty surprised how quickly lume fades. Basically, it all stinks compared to what I'd like it to do. But some obviously faded a lot faster than others.
The watches are, from left to right :
Top | Citizen B0000-04h | Epos Emotion 3390 | Steinhart Ocean 2 Premium | Glashutte Original PanoMaticLunar |
Bottom | Seiko 1977 Vintage | Hamilton Khaki Field | Seiko 5 SNKK27 | Seiko SBQK085 |

Some things I expected... The vintage Seiko pretty much dissappears right away, and the GO has very little lume and fades quickly as expected.
The Seiko 5 does well, and the Steinhart maybe not as well as I expected (the hands are good... the markers and bezel not as much).
The Epos did surprisingly well I think. And the Citizen was probably best overall, IMO, which also makes sense to me.