[VIDEO] Hands-On: the Amida Digitrend

Here’s the thing about wearing the Amida Digitrend: you can’t take a traditional wrist shot with it. It’s not an insignificant point in 2024, when the watch industry effectively lives on Instagram, and the currency through which influence is thrust upon brands, collectors, and all of the other personalities who have risen to prominence in recent years is the wrist shot. We expect them when our friends pick up a new piece for their collection, and it’s the first thing we ask for when a new watch is announced with a series of renders depicting the watch in some altered state. So can a watch find success with the enthusiast crowd if it’s virtually impossible to take a traditional wrist shot?

Amida deserves a lot of credit, I think, for rolling the dice and finding out in real time. Their new watch, the Digitrend, is one of the most interesting and quietly daring new watches to hit the market in the last few years. It takes a design that’s fifty years old and revives it so successfully that it forces you to wonder what’s happened to the industry in the intervening decades. How did we go from the strange and clever problem solving of the Digitrend to a nearly endless stream of Black Dialed Divers based on the same rudimentary outline? 

The answer to that question is far outside the scope of this review, but it’s worth reporting that we may indeed be nearing an end to the watch market being saturated with straightforward vintage inspired sports watches. This is a development worth celebrating even if more outside the box designs aren’t your cup of tea. The fact that we’re seeing more and more watches like the Digitrend aimed at the affordable enthusiast market is a sign that a class of collector that entered the hobby in the 2010s is maturing, embracing curiosity, and moving toward designs and brands that reflect a more unique outlook on watchmaking. Of course, there are plenty of brand new collectors entering the market as we speak, and they’re finding an embarrassment of riches when it comes to creative watchmaking on a (relative) budget.