Seiko's Heavyweight

I chose this watch as a Christmas present 2 years ago. I was driven by its stylish design and chronograph feature, powered by Seiko’s patented Kinetic movement.

The full face of the watch represents the second hand for the stopwatch. There are very small markers between the seconds that allow Seiko to claim that the stopwatch is accurate to 1/5 of a second, but you really have to look at it hard and close to see exactly where the hand exactly is.

To the top right of the face is the minute dial for the stopwatch which has a limit of 45 minutes. The dial is a little easier to read but you still have to look hard.

More than anything, the stopwatch feature is somewhat stylized and not very practical to be used for accurate measurement that requires quick and easy measurement readings.

The actual clock face is considerably small and is represented by a small circle in the lower half of the face. It’s not possible to distinguish between minutes as there are no markers for them. A separate dial for clock seconds is given at the top left of the face.

What bugged me the most is that the clock second hand and stopwatch second hand never fell exactly on a marker but slightly offset, as if it wasn’t calibrated correctly. It gave a cheap feeling to the watch considering that it was quite expensive at the time.

The overall design of all dials is very well laid out and elegant. When twisted in the light, many concentric rings can be seen to glisten around the dials at different speeds due to the different texture designs on the face.

The face is protected by a sapphire crystal mineral glass that is second in hardness, to diamond. After two years of wearing this watch, there is not a single scratch on the glass. This is what makes the watch look brand new all the time. A real plus.

The glass, coupled with the face design give the watch a good feeling of quality somewhat outweighing the issue regarding the offset hands.

The bracelet is solid and sturdy, as is the clasp. The clasp has never accidentally come undone.

The buttons to activate and reset the stopwatch give a very confident snapping sound and feeling when activating, so you know exactly when the action is performed.

Upon lifting the watch, its weight is very noticeably heavy. Although it’s easy to get used to wearing it everyday, it’s the first comment that others have made about it when I showed them the watch.

Seiko have an identical model made from Titanium (SNL005) which would definitely address the weight issue of the SNL001.