When it comes to dive watches, few men wearing them can testify to the watch’s strong points – the ability to resist water, corrosion and all manner of horrors underwater. Unless you’re the sort who can easily afford servicing, the odds that you’d be willing to even wash the dishes wearing a timepiece are slim to none.
Seiko Prospex Marinemaster Professional JAMSTEC Limited Edition
Us deskdivers may wince everytime our watches get nicked but the fact of the matter is that a dive watch is meant to be submerged and pushed to the limits. One of our favourites in the dive watch game is Seiko, a watchmaker who has pushed their watches over boundaries to ensure that even the most hardcore of divers aren’t going to do squat to their watches.
The Prospex line is Seiko’s own offering to the open waters. In the ’60s, scuba diving had crossed over from a career to hobby, prompting the need for timepieces that could follow men and women down into the depths. Prospex, or Professional Specifications, is no deskdive watch – it was created for the pros. As the brand puts it, a Japanese diver had complained to them stating that, “no watch was robust enough to withstand the stresses and strains he experienced when using a diving capsule and saturation diving techniques in depths greater than 300m.”
Seiko {Prospex Marinemaster Professional 1000M Hi-Beat 36000 Limited Edition
Posing that as a challenge, Seiko concentrated the efforts on diving watches. Constantly improving on the watches, the brand has gone from paltry depths of just 150 metres to almost ten times that amount. In all its years of the Prospex, Seiko has seen plenty of world’s firsts – the first dive watch in a titanium case, the first computerised diver watch as well as the world’s first dive watch with a ceramic case.
While the Prospex was first founded on a diving requirement, Seiko has come to add both a Air and Land range into the collection. More information can be found at the brand’s comprehensive site.