Watch winder

I finally received my Orbita watch winder today (I was fortunate enough to get into the beta program for the Sparta Mini model). It's far too early for a review but my initial impressions are all positive. The unit feels sturdy, holds my watch securely, and is absolutely dead silent. I can keep it right next to the bed and never hear a thing.

My biggest concern at this stage is what impact it will have on my Spirit's daily rate. The watch has been performing in stellar fashion in the 12:00 o'clock up position overnight and I'm hoping the winder is not a step backward.

I'll report back in a week or two with the results....

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Miscellany

• I finally got to see my father's Seiko 5 (an SNXE99K, I believe) and it was quite nice. The lume was more than respectable, the bracelet was solid (although integrated), and it was keeping time to the tune of +5 sec/day. For a 7S26 movement (7S26B, to be precise), that's not too shabby at all.

• Nikon has announced its new D700 SLR. Although it's still way beyond my price range, I can see that one day soon, my decision to hang on to all of my existing Nikkor lenses will be vindicated. The cropped DX sensors that prevailed at Nikon for so long rendered most of my wider lenses worthless (my beloved 24mm f/2.8 reduced to a boring 36mm). When a full-frame FX Nikon finally drops into $1,500 territory, I'll be back in the saddle again. :)

• I ran into another small shortcoming of the G9 this Saturday. Its inability to stop down to less than f/8 prevented me from achieving exactly the effect I was looking for in the shot below. I really wanted to blur this more and have the golden grass as a nice wash over the green background but there was simply no way to get my shutter speed below 1/20 sec. The G9 comes with a nifty electronic neutral density filter (good for a 3-stop light reduction) which certainly helped matters, but dropping another 2-3 stops to f/22 or f/32 would really have enhanced the final result. I guess diffraction exacts too high a toll at such tiny apertures.

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