Presenting the Amida Digitrend Open Sapphire Black: A Vision Brought to Light
Ladies and gentlemen, allow us to show you what happens when a vision refuses to stay still. This is the Amida Digitrend Open Sapphire Black. It is the proof that the original idea was never finished, it was simply waiting for the right moment to evolve.
When Amida shocked the watch world in 1976 with the mechanical Digitrend, it proposed a radical way to read time: a prism turning jumping-hour discs ninety degrees, so the display faced the driver. We resumed that mission with the first Open Sapphire. Now, we take it further.
The full sapphire hood, machined from a single block, no longer just reveals the movement but also it activates it. Light floods through the crystal shell, charges the BGW9 Super-LumiNova indices, and for the first time in Digitrend history the display ignites in the dark. A new DLC-coated steel framework replaces what was once hidden and utilitarian, turning the interior into deliberate architecture.
We build this watch in one hundred and fifty pieces. It is the work of a team that believes the mid-century vision was abandoned too soon, and that the machine they dreamed of making can finally exist. The Open Sapphire Black is not nostalgia. It is a historical correction — and we are just getting started.
The AMIDA Crew
LRD
LIGHT REFLECTING DISPLAY
There is no luminous or electronic display. So what is the secret? AMIDA’s idea is more than ingenious. The readout is actually an optical effect created by a crystal in the shape of a prism. The movement operates horizontally, but the ‘image’ of the hour and minute discs is projected vertically. AMIDA called its system LRD (for Light Reflecting Display), which was patented under No.3,786,626 on April 5, 1973. A remarkable and singular proposition in horology that makes the Digitrend a watch truly extra-ordinary.
UNIQUE REFINEMENTS
Featuring an in-house developed module with a unique dual-disc construction of only 9 components, doubling as both a plate and a casing ring, this modern movement,with the tightest tolerances, incorporates jumping hours for exceptional efficiency and precision. These technical improvements find themselves amplified by aesthetic refinements, like the redesigned minute window and completely redesigned typography–true to the original orange digits emblematic of the70s.
