![]() If I wear The Shogun for a few hours in sunlight, it’ll glow brightly for about 5 hours. Get into shadows while exploring a wreck or a coral bridge, and you need good lume. Lume is key because below 50′, one is mostly depending on the lume for legibility. It’s as good as Rolex’s Chromalite, and it outperforms the Super-LumiNova found on divers in this $1k price range. LumiBrite is Seiko’s proprietary luminescent paint, and it’s excellent. The lightness is just a delightful bonus. If you’re going to bend a watch, it’ll be while hauling tanks and climbing in and out of boats in rolling seas. That flexibility is important because even a slight distortion can lead to a leaky watch. Titanium, however, is light and far more capable of withstanding an impact without distortion. Steel is fine, but heavy and prone to material distortion upon impact. Having recently gone diving with the Tudor Pelagos FXD for a week, I became convinced that titanium is the best metal for a dive watch. What Makes The Shogun A Great Dive Watch Titanium To see the Shogun this way is to see it as a genuine continuation of Seiko’s dive watch heritage. But if you know anything about SCUBA diving, you, like me, may see the The Shogun more as a nerdy diving tool than as a fashion accessory. I’m not fool enough to miss that nerdy divers like The Seiko Shogun or most Doxas are also very fashionable here in 2022 as dive watches elevate themselves to priceless collectibles and Saudi-desert status symbols. Blancpain, Rolex, Zodiac in the 1950s), but instead with a near disregard for aesthetics in service of the technical demands of SCUBA diving as it evolved during the 1960s and 70s. The only other brand to achieve this level of nerdiness was Doxa, which, like Seiko, designed dive watches not from within the confines of a Euro-Swiss watchmaking tradition (e.g. It’s kind of incredible to see how consistently nerdy Seiko divers have been since the 1960s. – Insights E35 – How “In-House” Obscures The Quality of Movements (& Insults Our Intelligence) The Nerdier The Better Having owned Seiko dive watches for over 30 years, I have finally clarified what’s so exciting about them, and it requires no historical reference points whatsoever: Seiko makes some of the nerdiest dive watches ever created, and it’s their nerdiness that makes them so compelling. As such, The Shogun literally possess aspects of Seiko’s dive watch heritage. The following image makes my point, and one can do the same analysis of most Seiko divers, old and new. Like nearly all celebrated Seiko divers, the Shogun is an amalgam of various pre-existing divers. With the Shogun, I finally have a real Seiko diver again, one with its nerdy eye on excellent performance underwater – as it should be. Last year I bought Seiko’s retro 62MAS tribute, the SPB143, flipped it like a pancake, and now I own this killer titanium Shogun masterpiece, affectionately known as the SPB191 in North America and SBCD131 in Japan. Seiko was always a forward-looking brand, and I think advanced design and technology celebrates Seiko’s heritage more than any backward-looking reissue ever can. They’re never just like the original, the large Prospex logo announces that fact, and I’ve just grown bored with the whole enterprise. I’m done with Seiko’s reissued dive watches. $1399 MSRP (often around $1200 at point of sale)Įxtending Seiko’s Heritage (Not Regurgitating It).Precision: +8sec/day, 0.0ms beat error ( learn to read Timegraphs).Hands-On Seiko Shogun Titanium Dive Watch SPB191 SBCD131
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