This is the largest dial the Datejust is built in and the fullest marker set the model offers, on the ground that gives them the most room. Forty-one millimeters is the top of the range, ten millimeters wider than the smallest case carrying the name, and a plain white dial with a complete Roman set is the most legible combination available anywhere in it. Reference 126301 is the 41mm Datejust in a combination of stainless steel and Everose gold, carrying a smooth bezel, and this configuration pairs that dial with an Oyster bracelet. Nothing on the watch is doing anything other than telling the time.
The Oyster is built from three-piece links with the gold running as one continuous center line between broad flat sections of brushed steel. It is the plainer of the two bracelets and the one showing the least warm metal, which on a white dial produces a specific result: the watch reads as a steel watch with gold trim rather than as a two-metal watch, because the pale dial and the flat steel links belong to the same visual family and the gold is confined to a rim, a crown and a stripe. A three-piece link is also stiffer across its width than a five-piece one, so the bracelet holds more of a fixed curve and the watch sits higher and squarer on the wrist than the Jubilee version of the same reference does. The case is forty-one millimeters with the Everose bezel smooth rather than fluted, keeping that rim as one unbroken polished band. The dial is a flat white holding one value at every angle, with gold Roman numerals standing at the hours. Those numerals are the only warm element inside the crystal, and on a ground this pale they are the strongest thing on the dial by a wide margin, read as much by their shape as by their tone. A Roman numeral is a more complicated object than a baton and holds more gold in the same footprint, so a full set puts a surprising amount of warm metal inside the crystal even on a dial that otherwise contains none. That is what keeps this configuration from reading as a steel watch outright.
Hours, minutes, running seconds and a date changing in one step at midnight. The self-winding movement in the 41mm case holds roughly seventy hours of running time, a longer reserve than the smaller Datejust cases carry and enough to cover a weekend off the wrist. The date sits at three under a magnifying lens and takes the position a numeral would otherwise occupy, so the Roman set runs to ten characters rather than eleven. That absence is easier to accept on a numeral dial than on a marker dial, because ten characters still name their own positions and the eleventh is not needed to fix the layout. At this diameter those characters are printed larger than the same set at 36mm or 31mm, and the extra room is what makes the arrangement work here: a full Roman set is a crowded thing on a small dial and an open one on a large dial, and forty-one millimeters is the size where it has the most space. Combined with a flat white ground, which returns light evenly rather than sweeping between values, the result is the most straightforwardly legible watch in the family. Nothing on the dial reflects, nothing changes with the angle, and the characters carry the hours themselves rather than standing in for them. The seventy hours the movement holds are the other thing to know about this generation of the model. The previous one carried substantially less, and the difference is felt on a Monday morning rather than in any specification sheet, which is the kind of improvement that goes unnoticed until it is relied on.
On this reference the marker set is decided by whether the ground was made for the metal. Chocolate and sundust were developed alongside the Everose alloy and take applied markers; white, bright black and mint green come from the wider range and take Roman numerals; slate takes an arrangement of its own with a baton at nine. The four references here that are not Everose invert that, offering all three borrowed grounds with applied markers as well. White is the widest-built ground in the range and carries no metal preference at all: every Datejust reference at 31mm builds it, all six do at 41mm, and it appears at every other case size the brand makes. Within this reference it is one of eight grounds and one of six with no stones, since only chocolate and sundust are offered set. The fluted twin 126331 carries the same eight, and between the pair the rim is the only variable. So a white Roman dial in this metal at this size exists in exactly four watches: two rims, two bracelets, one dial. That is the entire field, and it is a smaller one than the ground's reach across the rest of the range would suggest.
This is the plainest watch the reference builds. No stones, no color, no reflective ground and the more restrained of the two bracelets, on the only ground in the range that has no relationship to any particular metal. What is left is proportion and legibility, which at forty-one millimeters is a reasonable thing to be left with. Anyone who wants the warm metal to register should take the Jubilee, where the gold is broken into three strips across the wrist and the watch reads considerably warmer than this. Anyone who wants a dial with some depth in it should take the slate or the bright black, both of which change with the light where this one does not. And anyone who wants applied markers on a white ground will have to move to one of the four references at this size that are not Everose, since neither Everose reference builds that version.
