Horological Meandering

Qlocktwo - Look Mom, No Hands!

Feb 20, 2012,06:17 AM

A Typographic Clock, the Qlocktwo is unique on the market today.
This is a clock to be read, real whole words if not a sentence. A quick glance will not do the trick.
Look Mom, no hands!

Winner of many design awards world wide a Qlocktwo is now gracing a wall in my kitchen and makes me smile every morning. The clock is available in German, English, French, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Danish, Swedish, Arabic, Swiss German and Spanish. My wife was for getting it in Swiss German so we learn something, but I was thinking of the early morning, before-enough-coffee brain state and pleaded for German so I don't need to think to understand it.

To eliminate all "I'm going to miss the train this morning" anxiety the Qlocktwo is radio controlled (in US parlance it is an "atomic clock") taking its signal from DCF77 in Mainflingen Germany which serves all of Europe . Another nice feature, the luminosity of the LEDs is controlled and adjusted according to the light in the room so the clock is always easy to read, but never uncomfortably bright. The front panel is available in several colors and stainless steel. I chose Lime Green to mitigate a bit our otherwise red and white kitchen color scheme.

The text indicates the time with a granularity of 5 minutes. The dots in the corners indicate the minutes following the indicated time so the final granularity is steps of one minute. It is neat the way the text slowly dances around the panel, always reading from top to bottom, but sometimes strewn across the face and at other times all clumped together.

A final neat thing, the front panel is replacable so if you get bored with the color or the language you can change it. I'm thinking about Arabic. It looks so beautiful, but I would need another clock next to it to tell the time.