Welcome the initiative, pamfried
I'd personaly like to see the dial txt finaly done in the correct "panerai" font style, as well as the color of the text matched to it's corresponding series.
In general, all the sausage (painted) dials should come with a very slight groove around the numerals, to emphasise the fact the lume is applied and not just spray-painted on top of the flat dial. DSN's have this groove, but is slightly wider than gen's, some old-school rep sausage dials replicate this feature to a tee.
All Luminor sandwich dials should be re-done, as they're all wrong in respect of both numeral cutouts shape and dial txt. Not the mention the wrong dial txt color. They somehow got the 183, 210, 127 and 217 dials correct, but not Luminors.
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More specifically:
- 000 & 005 'logos' with the correct letter 'R' shape on 000, higher letter 'A' crossbar, angled logo on 005, and altogether thinner dial txt and logo lines. Either L Swiss L or L Swiss Made L should be OK, depending on the caseback serial number to match.
- 001,002,004,009,111 & 112 sausage dials are already great, loop on number 6 and 9 could be a little curved inside to match the gen. Also crossbars on letter A should be a tad higher
- 036 & 082 need to be re-done as well...new dial txt and correct dial lume
- 113 needs upgrade, and the sunken second hand subdial.
- 183/210 Rads need higher letter A crossbars..everything else on them is spot-on
- Auto dials are getting better by the day, just look at the latest 104, 229 etc, very very nice and extremely close. I'd love to see the updated 27/28/29/63 and 188/196 dials with better dial print, though. Subs like 024/25/199 need also slight upgrade, but not a major one. 064 LaBomba is spot-on, close to perfect, it's sibling 087 needs a new L Swiss Made L dial positioning above chapter second markers instead of under, but that's now more of a hair-splitting.
- older pre-A, A, and B T-dial historics should be made with the correct T Swiss T txt under 6 o'clock, and proper aged T-dial lume...I mean how hard is this, realy?!?! We're not asking for a new Hublot big-bang or any other complicated dial design...come on, will 'ya !
- pre-historics (love the name
) from the early 90s, like the elusive 5218-201/A, 202, 203, 205, 207 etc. pseudo-sandwich dials with filled in indices shoudn't require any special method or machinery to be made and executed.
The main issue is finding the Asian dial maker that we as a whole could wear the cost of 500+ pieces/run for a single dial design production, and the one that can actually transfer the perfect dial drawing onto the finished dial...but that's an issue in itself. Pamman, Enzo, DSN and I had numerous discussions on this very theme in the past 2 years, but so far none of our attempts haven't fallen onto a fertile ground...so to speak. The latest dials are good, but we could do so much better and more with today's available techology and manufacturing processes.
I don't know about you guys, but when it comes to Panerai replica dials in general, I feel like I've been taken for a ride...especially after you compare them to much better rep dials from other brands, which are often much more complicated to design and produce. :x
cheers,
babola
