What-a-watch: Yema digital

I have a special interest in unique watches. I tend to look at early digital watches every now and then. I own two Tissot digital watches from the Newtimer series. The Newtimer came in three shapes with three colours (blue, red and black) per shape and with a few differences in dial layout. Among the three versions, I like this red one the best!

For all these Tissot watches, there was only one type of movement: Tissot kept basic design the same because form follows function. There is an hours window on the left and a minutes window on the right. In addition, a date window is at the bottom. This Tissot movement is special because it is a manufacturer caliber (completely designed and built by Tissot) and is an automatic-winding, fully jeweled movement. Most similar movements were pin-lever designs with none or maybe one jewel, and almost always these movements were hand-winding with few exceptions.

I came across the following pictures from watch collector Ruud van Rijn. The Tissot shows what a standard mechanical digital watch looks like, but this Yema seems to go out of its way to appear unconventional:

Not only are the colours striking, but the floating hour window is great. The orange pointer for minutes is a nice feature, too, de-emphasizing less-readable numbers and putting the focus right on the current minute. This particular movement is made by FE and also features a date window at the bottom. A clever addition is the outer seconds ring where the seconds are indicated with a moving orange pointer—in the photo above it is at 45 seconds. The best thing about this Yema is that it is a fully jeweled (17 jewels) movement. With this Yema, function follows form. The design was thought of first, and a movement to make it work followed afterward. This same philosophy can be found in the following model.

The Yema above is a small ladies' version of the previous model. Again, it is fully jeweled and contains a hand-wind movement, this time based on a Lorsa design. There was no room for a date or for the seconds ring, but the the design is clearly the same. Both Yemas are watches that are easy to like because of their forms and for their great yellow, green, and orange colour combinations!