This is the only dial on the reference bright enough that the bezel stops being the obvious place to look. Reference 278341RBR is the 31mm Datejust in a combination of stainless steel and Everose gold with a domed bezel set with diamonds, and this configuration carries a white dial with Roman numerals and no stones on it, on the Oyster bracelet. On every other ground here the dial is darker or warmer than the case, so the ring of stones is the first thing the eye finds and everything else arranges itself around it. A white lacquer changes the arithmetic. It returns light across its entire area rather than from a set of points, and the dial is a good deal larger than the bezel, so the two arrive at roughly the same moment.
A white lacquer returns light across its whole area, and a stone returns it from a point. That is the difference this configuration turns on. The bezel is a dome rather than a flat ring, so its stones sit at continuously varying angles and only an arc of the band is lit at any moment, which means the bezel is bright in sections and never all at once. The dial has no such limitation. Applied opaque in thin coats so it holds an even value across the curve, a white ground is uniformly bright from every angle at the same time, and at 31mm it occupies more of the watch than the bezel does. Set into it are Roman numerals in solid Everose, which are open figures rather than filled bars, so the gold reads as drawn line and the white shows through the middle of every character. That keeps the dial from gaining the weight a marker set this large would otherwise give it. White is also the only ground on the reference providing real contrast against Everose rather than sitting close to it, which makes this the most legible watch here by a wide margin. Steel takes the case body and the outer bracelet links while Everose takes the bezel, the crown, the bracelet center rows, the numerals and the hands, all of it solid rather than plated. The Oyster bracelet is three broad flat links, brushed across the top with polished flanks, closing on a concealed clasp.
The watch does one thing beyond telling the time. The date changes instantaneously at midnight rather than creeping through the hours around it, which is the function the Datejust introduced in 1945 and the one it takes its name from. Its disc is white to match the dial, and this is the one ground on the reference where the printed numeral in the window carries about the same weight as the characters around it rather than standing out as the only dark mark inside the crystal. On a matched or a dark dial the date is where the eye goes first, and here it takes its place in the sequence. The frame around the aperture is drawn for a 31mm dial rather than reduced from a wider one, so it does not press against the numerals at its shoulders, and the Cyclops lens above it, fitted to the model since 1953, enlarges the numeral roughly two and a half times. On a dial with this much contrast already the lens is doing less work than it does elsewhere, though it remains the fastest way to read a date at this size. Correction runs through the winding crown at a dedicated position and leaves the hands where they are. The movement is self-winding with a power reserve of approximately 55 hours, built for a case this narrow rather than carried down from a wider one, since a smaller barrel stores less energy and a lighter rotor takes in less of it from the same arm. The crown screws down against the case.
The Datejust has been in production since 1945, when it became the first self-winding wristwatch to show the date through a window on the dial. The 31mm case sits between the 28mm Lady-Datejust and the 36mm original, and the 278000 generation replaced the 178000 series in 2018 with a revised case and bracelet. Rolex registered the name for its steel and gold construction in 1933, on the reasoning that steel supplies the structure and gold supplies everything the eye takes in. A white dial with Roman numerals is the oldest surviving idea in the model and the one that has changed least across its whole history. Everose is far newer, introduced in 2005, and diamond-set bezels were offered on the Datejust long before either the alloy or this generation existed. Within the generation, 278341RBR is the steel and Everose reference with a diamond-set domed bezel, and 278241 offers the identical dial under a plain dome. This configuration is therefore the oldest dial the model makes, wearing an old form of decoration, in a metal that is twenty years old, which is a stranger combination on paper than it is on a wrist. White is one of three grounds this reference offers unset.
The buyer for this wants a decorated watch that can still be read across a desk, and there is only one of those on the reference. Every other route to a gem-set bezel involves accepting a dial that gives up contrast somewhere, whether by matching the case, by going dark, or by replacing its markers with stones. This one gives up nothing. The Roman sequence is as legible as the model gets and the bezel does its work without asking the dial for room. The Oyster bracelet holds the same line, three broad links built for daily wear rather than for occasions. What it will not do is look subtle, since a white dial makes the stones more visible rather than less by giving them a bright field to sit against. Buyers arrive here from the plain-bezel white having decided the watch needed more presence, and from the warmer gem-set grounds having decided they wanted to be able to read the time. The second group tends to arrive later and to stay.
