Tuesday, April 16, 2013

ETA 2888? Lucky number???

Genuine or Fake Roamer Automatic Day-Date


"Roamer is a brand for people who love their life and enjoy valuable moments...", that's the statement I came upon while browsing the company's website. For more than 120 years Roamer have been developing outstanding and prestigious watches bearing the Swiss Made seal of quality. The history of Roamer started back in 1888 in a small workshop in Solothurn in Switzerland by Fritz Meyer. Today Roamer is owned by The Swiss Watch Group and Chung Nam Corporation, and has successfully reposition itself in international market. ROAMER offers prestigious, high quality watches that are accessible to aspiring and determined individuals worldwide.

This is a suppose to be a vintage Roamer from 1970's that I have in my possession. I bought this watch from a Hong Kong ebay seller, for one single reason only... it's movement.


The silver colour dial with the red round Roamer logo is quite soothing to admire at. If not careful one may mistakenly identify it as a Rado. This Roamer has a common look with some Rado voyager, gold, green, purple horse series and some other Swiss watches from the same era focusing on Asian's growing market. I believe the marketing strategies back then were creating elegance looking and yet affordable watches bearing Swiss name and with Swiss movement reliability.  



The crown and the clasp are signed with a capital R, representing Roamer. This is a pull out and adjust crown.




This is the interesting bit.... I have never seen a ETA 2888 movement before. No information can be found regarding this movement. In some watch forums, some experts even question whether this is an Asian made movement. But upon careful inspections, in my humble opinion, this is no doubt a genuine ETA lower end movement. ETA 2888 is a 17 jewels automatic movement with day date function at 3 o'clock position. The rotor of this watch must have been redone and the wordings 21 jewels are added on. Therefore, I suspect this is a fake Roamer. The case, the dial, the crown and the bracelet maybe from Hong Kong but the movement is definitely genuine SWISS MADE. Conclusion cannot be drawn because at a stage Roamer was owned by Hong Kong company. Can someone shed some light on this?


We learn something new everyday in our watches collection journey... sometimes the journey maybe painful.....


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