On a day one week ago, VS announced that they accepted orders for all Panerai watches, many people placed orders, now they stopped accepting Panerai orders again, but I received news from the market, it is about VS factory, that is you can order watches from VS, but need to wait for them to process your order, and not sure for how long. This is a good news for us, and VS factory may reopen in 2022.
So, if you want the best Panerai replica, I still suggest you place your order first with VS, then wait. Besides VS, do you have other options? I said no. As far as I know, during the closure of VS factory in 2021, only two factories made Panerai watches, HW and TTF, but their quality is not the best, does not match the quality level of VS Panerai, only moderate.
For people who want a moderate quality Panerai with manual winding movement, HW factory is a wise option, their price is much affordable. Take this PAM 111 for example, it looks nice from these photos, case finish is good, sandwiched dial construction as genuine watch, high quality and durable leather band, its quality can meet most people’s standard.
My first Panerai is PAM 111, I bought from the market and it still works very well. Some people do not like such watch with manual winding movement, because they found it is inconvenient to wind a watch, however, for me, especially for my replica PAM 111, it always reminds me to wind it everyday to keep an accurate time, for a replica with automatic movement, you also need to wind it each day, because the movement in a replica, even the highest quality replica, does not have enough power reserve like genuine watch. So, my PAM 111 helps me keeping a good habit.
The finish, whatever on the case or on the dial, it will not be a shortcoming for this moderate quality Panerai, the case and dial can be also made to be perfect by HW factory, the only difference lies in the movement. This Panerai PAM 911 replica uses an Asia clone 6497 movement, but if you open the case back, you will find the movement is not decorated, which means there are no blue engravings like “OFFICINE PANERAI”, so, the movement does not look like the one in genuine watch in appearance, but the function has no difference. For this PAM 911 with a solid case back, this is acceptable. Due to the Covid-19 and raid, I think no factories are willing to spend a lot of money in developing better clone movements for Panerai, we can only expect VS back to normal soon.