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- Tissot Goes For Another Home Run With The Seastar 1000 Quartz 40mm, Yema Steps Into Field Watches, The New Nodus Is Pretty In Pink and The Miyota 9075 Is A Game Changer
Tissot Goes For Another Home Run With The Seastar 1000 Quartz 40mm, Yema Steps Into Field Watches, The New Nodus Is Pretty In Pink and The Miyota 9075 Is A Game Changer
After becoming an industry staple with the PRX, Tissot is conquering divers
Vuk Radic
May 01, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 16 minutes
Hey friends, it’s International Workers’ Day but there are no unions protecting the hard workers of It’s About Time, so here's a new edition for you.
In this issue:
Tissot debuts New Tissot Seastar 1000 Quartz 40mm
Yema steps into vintage-inspired Field watches
The New Nodus is pretty in pink
Zelos Introduces their First GMT with the Miyota 9075 Flyer Movement
And… invite your friends to win a Seiko Alpinist
Today’s reading time: 7 minutes and 57 seconds
Everybody needs a green faced watch in their life. That’s why we have a new giveaway - it’s the Seiko SPB121J1, aka the Seiko Alpinist in a wonderful shade of green. In fact, we’re giving away two of them!
All you have to do is click the button below and have five of your friends subscribe. Both you and one of your friends will be eligible to win one of the watches
We only have two conditions when entering this giveaway - invite 5 of your friends to subscribe and live somewhere were you can buy the Alpinist, so we can get this for you and ship it to your address. That’s it!
👂What’s new
1/
If you just dare think what the best affordable Swiss automatic watch would be and people online will scream Tissot PRX at you. And for good reason. It’s well built, it looks way above its price range and it doesn’t have much competition. Tissot is embracing this huge popularity and applying it to their other models - including the Seastar collection of dive watches. Now they’re introducing the new Tissot Seastar 1000 Quartz 40mm in three colorways.
The Tissot Seastar 1000 Quartz 40mm is a physical upgrade of the steel cased 36mm models that were released last year, splitting the difference to the 45.5mm chronographs from the Seastar 1000 Quartz series. Not only is it a split difference, but also perhaps the perfect size for a diver - a 36mm is too small for a diver, and not many people can pull off a 45.5mm.
Aside from the novel case size, the rest of the new Tissot Seastar 1000 Quartz 40mm is very much in line with what can be observed throughout its 36mm counterparts. This means flat sapphire crystals, solid screw-down stainless steel casebacks, and 300 meters of water resistance. Colors are also transferred from the smaller watch - you can get it with a black lacquer dial, a black bezel insert, and a stainless steel bracelet or with a dial and bezel in a rich shade of blue. You can also opt for the black dial and bezel, but with gold-colored accents and a black rubber strap.
Powering the new Tissot Seastar 1000 Quartz 40mm models is the ETA F06.412 quartz movement, which is a 3-jewel caliber that is powered by a single 371 battery cell. Although Tissot does offer a 43mm version of the Seastar 1000 that is powered by the brand’s Powermatic 80 movement, these new 40mm models are specifically being added to the quartz lineup, although we may eventually see a 40mm automatic version at some point in the future.
The price is low, as you would expect - $395 USD for the gilt-finished model on a rubber strap or $425 USD for either of the versions on a bracelet.
2/
Go to Yema’s website and you’ll see a lot of divers, military watches and chronographs - overall rugged tool watches. Up until now, that is. Yema is introducing the Urban Field Collection, an interesting menage of sizes and colors that give off a very vintage field watch vide.
It all starts with a 3-part classic case, with a thin bezel and solid lugs. Entirely polished and made of steel, it is available in two dimensions: 37.5mm and 40mm. The 100m water-resistant case has a domed sapphire crystal on top for a retro look and a sapphire crystal on the back to check the movement. And better still, it’s also a thin watch, with a 7.80mm height without the crystal and well below 10mm with it.
The field watch connection is most evident on the dial. It comes in five colors (white, black, green, blue and ochre) and gets a sandblasted surface. The minute scale and markers are thick and meaty, while the font is super interesting. The hands are quite thin, but their polished surface and luminous inserts provide enough contrast.
Powering the Yema Urban Field models is the well-known Sellita SW210-1b with a decent 42h power reserve. You can get it on two different steel bracelets (go check them out because they are very interesting) and you get an additional leather strap.
The Yema Urban Field collection is now available to order and deliveries of the first 300 pieces are expected at the end of June of this year. Both sizes are priced identically, meaning EUR or USD 1,099 on the Bonklip bracelet and EUR or USD 1,249 on the multi-link bracelet.
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In the past six years, the Los Angeles-based Nodus has amassed quite a following. Including our readers, one of who updated us in real time as Nodus put out a new watch. You know who you are, thanks a lot! Keep us posted. Many micro and indie brands like Nodus will put out a model or two and then offer variations on it for years and years to come. Nodus does this as well, but now in 2023 they are introducing a completely new model - the Nodus Unity, a compact, fixed-bezeled, watch in two fantastic colors.
The steel case measures 36.5mm and overall gets a brushed finish. The domed box sapphire crystal protects the dial and overall the watch measures 11.3mm thick. Surrounding the crystal on the Nodus Unity is a fixed bezel that consists of a polished stainless steel outer ring fitted with a colored ceramic insert that is entirely devoid of any type of scales or markings. Available in either light blue or pink to match the dials of the two watches, the ceramic bezel insert features an angled profile that allows it to sit completely flush with the rounded edges of the crystal.
The bright blue and light pink on the bezel would have been a nice pop of color, if it weren’t for the dial in the same shade, making the watches scream. In a good way. Aside from their colors, both dials offer the same overall design, with a sandwich-style construction that features applied polished steel surrounds for the hour markers. The cutouts for the indexes appear as slightly rounded arrow shapes, with larger markers positioned at the cardinal points and a date window at 6 o’clock (with a proper color-matched calendar disc).
Powering the new Nodus Unity collection is the Miyota 9015 automatic movement, which is the same caliber that the brand uses inside other models. Fitted to the drilled lugs of the Nodus Unity is a stainless steel bracelet that offers a flat three-link design and tapers from 20mm at the lugs down to 16mm. It’s also nice to note that the clasp has a push button release that offers five positions of on-the-fly incremental adjustment.
For a watch with nice finishing and a ceramic bezel, $700 seems like a steal.
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If, for some reason, you wake up one morning adamant that this will be the day when you buy a single-handed watch, chances are you will be looking towards one brand only MeisterSinger. There have been others that have attempted this format, but none have been as adamant about only producing watches that have one single hand as MS. The brand is now taking three of it’s core models, the N°01, N°03 and Perigraph, and dressing them up a bit with white dials, gold-coloured applied hour indices, a black hand and black and blue details all around.
The N°01 is where it all started for MeisterSinger, as this hand-wound model has been around since 2001. It has a 43mm wide stainless steel case with a brushed and polished finish. It has a sapphire crystal on the front, with a solid caseback covering the movement. Inside we find the Sellita SW210, which has a power reserve of 42 hours. It’s worn on a cognac leather strap with a printed crocodile pattern. The N°01 retails for EUR 1,690, making it the most affordable of the trio.
The N°03 is basically the N°01, but with an automatic movement and both are still top-sellers for the brand. Inside is the Sellita SW200 in a no-date configuration and 38h of power reserve. It’s priced a bit higher compared to its manual sibling and retails for EUR 1,990.
The third member of this new series of white dial MeisterSinger watches is the Perigraph, which displays a full date disc on it’s dial, with a subtle blue triangular pointer showing the correct date. The Perigraph tops out the trio at EUR 2,190.
5/
Microbrands are all over the GMT trend. For years, they had to settle for what are called office or caller GMT. These GMT complications only allow you to adjust the 24-hour hand, and usually only forwards in time. This is practical when you want to adjust the additional time display to display the time in another area of the world, whether to track the time in one of your offices abroad or to check the time of your relatives living in a different country.
These GMT complications are commonly found in entry-level watchmaking or watches equipped with outsourced movements (ETA 2893-2 or Sellita SW330-1), as it’s easy to modify the movement. True or flyer GMT movements, on the, allow the local hour hand to jump back and forward. But this is a more technically complex movement, making it more expensive to make.
Enter the Miyota 9075, a game changer in the GMT world, allowing brands whose bread and butter are sub $1,000 watches to offer a much sought after complication that consumers would previously have to spend many times that amount to acquire. Now the microbrand Zelos gets the 9075.
Of the three new GMTs in Zelos’ catalogue, the most simple is the Mako 300M GMT Frost, which appears at first to be a stark white dial, but is actually fully lumed. Next up is the Mako 300M GMT Blue Meteorite, which as the name implies features a bright blue PVD meteorite dial. This time the accent color is yellow for the GMT, which is a nice match for the blue tone, while still allowing the dominant color to take center stage. The third watch is the Mako 300M GMT Mosaic MOP. This one features what Zelos describes as a black mother of pearl dial inlaid in a “turbine” mosaic pattern.
In terms of specs, the new Mako GMTs are in 40mm stainless steel cases that are 300 meters water resistant and 12.5mm thick. The 24 hour bezels, which allow for the potential tracking of three time zones, are all in polished ceramic, and loosely color matched to their respective dials. The watches come mounted to a matching stainless steel bracelet with a quick adjust clasp.
All three are available as of today, with the Frost coming in at $529, the Blue Meteorite at $629, and the Mosaic MOP at $549. You see why we should all bow down to the Miyota 9075?
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💵Pre-loved precision
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Everybody needs a green faced watch in their life. That’s why we have a new giveaway - it’s the Seiko SPB121J1, aka the Seiko Alpinist in a wonderful shade of green. In fact, we’re giving away two of them!
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