It’s great to see Tissot getting back on Horbiter® once again after quite a long time. It was not our decision not to cover the brand anymore but after having attended the Misano MotoGP Grand Prix back in 2015, the 2015 Eicma and have finally got our hands-on the Tissot T–Race Jorge Lorenzo at Baselworld 2017, the brand went out of our radar by pure chance. The link between Tissot and the sports chronograph is a close one. In a product catalog that virtually offers any product, from mechanical hand-wound to pocket watches, the sports quartz chronograph is a pillar of Tissot‘s current production.
Tissot is pretty familiar with the world of diving too, the brand’s Seastar 1000 Powermatic 80 is a top seller, and one of the best diver’s watches money can buy today. Try and find, in the benchmark, another mechanical timepiece offering 80 hours of power reserve, equipped with ceramic bezel and smokey blue dial retail for € 675. It is no coincidence that the Seastar 1000 Powermatic 80 is among Tissot‘s best-selling watches, whose only let down is to feature a transparent case-back, something that makes no sense on a diver’s watch. The Tissot Seastar 1000 Chronograph Quartz combines the successful design of the Seastar 1000 Powermatic 80 with the quartz Chrono that Marc Marquez and Jorge Lorenzo use in the MotoGP paddock.
Featuring a depth rating of up to 300 meters, it comes with a 45.5 mm large case, just 2.5 mm wider than the base model’s while keeping the same overall thickness (only + 0.1 mm thick) thanks to the adoption of a quartz caliber that slims down the case. This feat makes the two cases comparable (the Chrono offers, as a result of a larger case, an increased lug-to-lug distance). The ETA G10.212 quartz caliber provides functions that are hard to get on a similar mechanical variant, in this price range: the Tissot Seastar 1000 Chronograph Quartz has 30-minute and 1/10 second counters, central 60-second chronograph hand, and “ADD,” “SPLIT” functions. The former feature allows the user to time two events without having to restart the chronograph, while the second one is the quartz version of a double chronograph, but (obviously) without using two separate hands, as it is with a mechanical timepiece. The cherry on the cake is the adoption of screwed down chrono buttons, a solution that helps to avoid to activate the chronograph inadvertently. Its retail price? It is slightly below the € 500 threshold (€ 495 to be more precise), a reasonable one if you are crazy with multifunctional chronographs, that are suited for sports diving whose weight is acceptable and on par with the only time diver’s watch (109g).
(Photo credit: courtesy of Tissot, Peter Tung for Horbiter®)
Gaetano C @Horbiter®
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