LED wristwatches

Does anyone make LED wristwatches anymore? anyone at all? they were 1000 times cooler than leds.

I assume you mean cooler than lcd.

I don’t think they do, for a pretty good reason… changing the battery every couple months instead of every couple of years sucks.

LCD uses a tiny fraction of the power the LED does.

      • If you mean the 70’s ones that actually glowed red (or later, green), they weren’t LED’s, they are a neon/gas plasma display. You still see the same type of displays used on some cash registers, for instance…-there’s a nickname electronics buffs have for them, -uh, pixies? or something like that. You can still buy the calculator-sized displays in groups of 8-12 digits (like, for a counter) or as individually. Dunno if ya can build a usable watch though.
        ~

Close, how about Nixie tubes ?

(there actually is a ‘wristwatch’ - scroll down a bit on the page)

To get back on topic, one of the famous LED watches was the Pulsar, introduced in 1970. Google shows a wealth of collector & repair sites.

If you want to buy an LED watch…

Yes - Spoon (a division of Pulsar/Seiko) makes an uber cool high fashion, high tech LED/LCD watch. I got two for my watch collection one of which was immediately snagged right of it’s display case by my 15 year old daughter to complete her “look”.

Well at least it’s leading a useful life.

Here’s the watch in non-LED mode

As a proud Son Of Ether, I say you can NEVER have too many LED’s.

You could get LED number displays from answering machines. But their large size is better suited to an LED pocketwatch.

Re-Nixie tubes
Anybody know a way to get the proper gases and then reseal these things? My handheld Space Invaders clone is broken :frowning:

Are you sure? Maybe very early ones, but LED technology is much simpler and probably more energy efficient than plasma displays and LED’s were certainly readily available in the 70’s.

I owned an LED watch in the 1970’s, a “graduation from junior high school” gift.

The battery lasted several years, as I recall.

I loved LED watches, but I got dang sick and tired of changing the batteries every month or so. I changed to LCDs when they came out and never looked back.
The LED watches were great as portable darkroom safelights, though.

A friend of mine in grade school had an LED watch. While I thought it was pretty neat and futuristic-looking, it was hard for him to read it in sunlight, so any time we were outside and he needed to check the time he’d have to hold his hand over the watch to shield out the sun so that he could read it. I imagine this may have been one reason they didn’t remain on the market.

If I recall, his watch only displayed the time if a button were pressed, otherwise the display was blank, so this probably helped to save on the battery power consumption. For those of you who had to change your batteries all the time, was the display on all the time?

I just remembered—my LED watch had a solar power cell!

That would explain my good results!