**This review is intended for watch novices, not experienced connoisseurs** I am a watch novice. Before this I'd only owned two watches, both pretty cheap, both from a different brand, one of them digital. They both ran on battery power. They weren't as fancy or good-looking as this watch, but they did tell me what time it was, accurately, every day. For the Bulova 96a120, it only tells you what time it is if you haven't stopped wearing it since the last time you set it. Meaning, if you don't wear it constantly, it stops working. It stops keeping time. Bulova boasts about this. It's an automatic watch powered by the wearer's movement. Pretty cool, right?! Yeah, cool technology. Too bad it doesn't tell you what time it is unless you tell it what time it is first. Apparently (NOT explained in the manual, but something I read here from a review) there is a way to wind the watch to keep it accurate overnight while you sleep. But even so, you need to wear it every day, plus wind it every night, for it to perform its function. And knowing you can't trust your watch is an additional problem -- if I'm checking it for the first time in a few hours, I can't be certain I can trust it because it may have stopped, so I check my phone afterwards to be sure. Kind of defeats the purpose. If those issues don't sound bad to you because you like the idea of setting your watch every time you use it, and you like the pictures, then go for it. I know plenty of people that sacrifice convenience and function for style. Just know before you buy: the Bulova 96a120 (and others like it, I assume) is the watch equivalent of a solid gold toilet that you have to plunge every time you flush, or a shower you can only use if you're clean. At least it looks great, but you don't need my review to tell you how it looks. Another couple of positives: I like the size of it on my wrist, and I think the colors look good. It's kind of annoying to get on and off, but reasonably comfortable once on. I noticed almost every review for this watch is positive, and the only critical reviews (with the same complaints as mine) have mostly "unhelpful" votes. But those reviews are accurate; I assume the downvotes are from Bulova fans who think those of us who expect our watches to keep accurate time even if we don't want to wear it every day are unsophisticated heathens. That's fine. But while Bulova does say in its marketing that the watch is powered by the wearer's movement, it doesn't say the movement needs to be constant for the power to last. The person who bought me this watch as a gift made the reasonable assumption that the watch would be functional even if I only wore it sometimes. "For $500 I thought it would keep track of the time," she said. But that's not the case.
I bought this watch a couple weeks ago. It's my first Bulova watch and first watch with an automatic mechanical wind. It loses time a lot, and I wear it most every day. It gets tiring having to reset the time every morning, or when I forget to do so, then I look at my watch later in the day and realize it's clearly not 3 in the morning. This is annoying. Also, the user manual is effectively useless. I downloaded the manual from this webpage for this specific watch (though it's just the general manual) and while it refers to manually winding your automatic watch, it doesn't give any details on how to do that! So, as I said, useless.
Bulova Response