Orient Ana-Digi Models

A few months ago I posted an article here about Orient's digital watches. However, throughout most of its history, Orient stayed true to analog watch designs, even during the 1980s when much of the production went quartz.

Could the two worlds, the digital and the analog, converge? They sure could. A possible driver that accelerated this trend was the introduction of the Breitling B1 in 1998. An heir to the 1985 Aerospace, the B1 added a couple of chronograph-style buttons for a sportier look. Orient, as we know, was never late to pay homage to a successful design.

Orient adopted the Miyota T241 Analog-Digital quartz movement to form the basis for the new watch. The model was identified as a family of references starting with VZ00 (all T241-based models were identified by the VZ movement code).

The T241-based models featured all the goodies one could expect from a digital watch, including perpetual date correction, millisecond stopwatch and count-down, chime, and more.

The design proved a success – while immediately recognizable, it was different enough from the Breitling and its soon-to-arrive cheap copies, and definitely much better built than most lookalikes. And it was smaller than the B1, at 42mm vs 43mm, and lighter.

In a move also quite typical of Orient, it then took the design and evolved it to be less derivative and more unique, giving birth to four more variations, VZ01-VZ04, each of which can be found in a few colorways.

One thing that the T241 lacked was a backlight for its LCD display. Orient could (and did) add lume to the analog hands, but the digital display was thus rendered mostly useless in the dark. This might have been the main reason that Orient introduced a second line of Ana-Digi models, with the GX movement code.

The GX movement was probably also cheaper, having just one digital display instead of the VZ dual display, allowing a lower cost of these new models. It was also generally simpler, for instance only offering a "complete calendar" instead of perpetual – namely, the February month-end date had to be adjusted for leap years. But it did include backlight.

The GX lineage was much shorter than the VZ; admittedly, it was not as attractive. Orient also tried some other designs, but none was as popular as the VZ00, and the further the brand tried to distance its styling from the VZ00's, the less successful it was. In fact, while most of Orient's ana-digi watches remain fairly obscure, the long-discontinued VZ00 remains highly sought after to this day.

Orient's Japan-made lineup does not feature any new analog-digital watches. Yet, some consolation can be found in the production of sibling Orient Brazil.

Pictured above are two of the Brazilian branch Solartech models, featuring a single digital display. This watchmaker also produces Anadigi models under its Neo Sports line, with two LCD displays. As you can expect, these are beefy 45mm watches, not at all bad looking, and fairly hard – though not impossible – to obtain outside Brazil.

Pictures that appear in this post were taken from old Orient catalogs, user manuals, Orient Brazil website, and sale ads.