Thinking of owning one if these and haven't seen one in crisp condition for a while. Do they exist? What do you guys think of this? Too much patina? I'm partial to a steel case as opposed to a gold capped one. http://bit.ly/Z8NM8L
Yes, he has the calendar version. I only owned one of these before and it wasn't a good example. I want something simple and clean from the early Geneve range to add to the collection at some point.
That's probably a correct watch. The 14.702 was the non-date version which came with a 552 for the last couple years of it's production (1959 and 1960 - and maybe a little into 1961) and the movement serial number matches that. The 14.703 is the date version with the 562 like I have, which is from 1960. Something looks off with the crystal retaining ring, which isn't too big of a deal. There are NOS / service replacement dials floating around for these that are damn near exact to the originals. The rotor is scraping the caseback.
The date 14.703 and non-date 14.702 only came with the 552/562 in 1959 and 1960, maybe a little into 1961. There were several iterations of each, going up to -5 or -6 I think. Before that in the mid to late 50's, there were models with the 47x, 49x and 50x (ie: 2892 = 503) calibers inside that were nearly identical, but Omega was switching the model numbers from 4 digit to 5 digit during the late 50's (1958?). There were even nearly identical watches but with manual wind calibers from the 28x series inside. The last was the 14.726 in 1961 which looked exactly the same as the 14.702 - the only difference on the dial was the lack of the word "AUTOMATIC" of course. Overall, this style of Genève was made from around 1954 to 1961. Originally these were to be the manual wind high end non-chronometer counterpart to the automatic Constellations, but after 2 or 3 years Omega made automatic non-chronometer versions of the Genève too. I don't recall if there were chronometer versions but if there were they'd be very rare.