Originally Posted by
50kopek
A somewhat unusual Seiko arrived from Japan. This is a 5619-7000 Duotime from May 1972. The most striking thing about it is obviously the orange hand that is used to track a second timezone on the same 12hr scale as the main hands. The orange hand is independantly ajustable in 1hr increments. It also features a quick set date and the automatic movement can be handwound. And just to stir someting up, I believe Rolex didn't have the independant gmt/2nd timezone hand with a quick set date until around 1983...
The 5619 movement comes from the same base movement as that used in, amongst others, the 56KS and 56GS models. The only downside of the movement is that it suffers from the same issue as other members of the 56xx movement familiy: the part used for setting the orange hand and the date (and in other 56XX models for setting the day and date) is made of plastic and tends to break easily. The shape of the case is also reminiscent of some KS and GS models.
There's not a lot of information available on these. From what I can tell there we're two series, the 5619-7000, produced only in may and november 1972, and the 5619-701X, produced in november 1972 and possibly a little later. The 5619-7000 came with white and beautiful deep blue dials (those are the only variants in a 1973 brochure), and I think I've seen a silver dial on Ebay too. The 5619-701X series came in blue and whie dials as well and has a chapter ring with minute track on the outside of the dial, but dropped the name 'Duotime' from the dial, which is one of the things I like best about the earlier models. As can be seen by the symbol below the word 'Duotime' these models came out of the Suwa factory.
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