I presently own three San Martin watches, and have owned a few more in the last few years. The three I own at the moment are either their own designs or arguably a distant homage. These are the watches watch snobs absolutely love to hate because the quality, specs, and finish are absolutely incredible, and I don't just mean for the money. The attention to detail including the case finishing, bracelets and clasps, as well as the fact you know the lume will be brilliant and the sapphire will be crystal, just knocks high street brands out of the water. If history and heritage is of any great importance then don't bother buying one, but if you just want a great watch look no further. Here is a video I recently made, and this watch is fantastic
Yes, shame about the bezel. It also isn't a handsome bezel insofar as diver's bezels go. I agree it has a hint of Oris and a waft of Alpina perhaps, too. That isn't bad. I think they should revise the similarity between the GMT and seconds hand, though. That's made for confusion in my opinion. It's difficult to please watch folk, but it's clearly also difficult to come up with a truly coherent watch that embraces all it's functions equally without detracting from the other elements. It's interesting to see San Martin's journey in that respect, but I also have the impression that the pressure to truly get it right and spend enough time in development to achieve this isn't there. I wonder who is or are responsible for design at San Martin.
I didn't have an image of the Hydroconquest. That feels quite derivative itself, but I guess we need a detailed typology to determine who has bragging rights. I mainly see how the bezel is very similar on immediate impression, and it's quite nasty looking in the Hydroconquest too (in my opinion). So it's difficult in hindsight to criticise San Martin for using the same approach (see my comment above)!
Maybe they should find a nice old watch design from the 1930’s and produce exact 1:1 replicas of that? They could even register that as their own design and start suing others who produce similar watches. Worked for others, so might work for San Martin as well 🤔
Funny enough, my memory of that thread is that they made those changes not because people didn't like the similarity to the original, but because people didn't like the original itself. The San Martin version ended up as kind of a wish fulfillment for people who kind of like the Longines but are turned off by the circle hour markers, hour hand shape, date everyone, etc.
There’s a watch world? Is it an exclusive club? 😉
No, it’s not exclusive at all. It’s pretty much this entire forum except the Affordable Watches and San Martin subforums
I actually like the look of the SM better than the Longines, based on the posted images anyway, for most of the reasons you mentioned.
It’s an odd green for me. And why does everyone use the same white date dial? Is there one company worldwide that everyone sources watches from and all they sell is black letters on white?
Right?! Color matching date wheels must be hard.. SMH.
Just buy a used one if you don’t feel like ordering from AliExpress. They’re priced even lower used.
The opposing lumed marker on many dive and other casual watches is usually white or very light in colour, so a white-backed date wheel is useful in maintaining symmetry.
Depends. If they wanted to feature match the Longines, they'd have to use the Miyota 9075, and Miyota isn't just handing those out to everyone who might want one. The deep dish pizza rehaut kinda kills it for me, but I'm just not a fan of super deep rehauts. That's not their fault though, it's an unavoidable aspect of using NH34 vs. something like SW330.
It's NH34. Seiko makes white and black date discs for it. Anything else would have to be custom printed. I would imagine SM doesn't exactly have big fat margins on these, so that's not happening.
