Finding the balance between practicality, style and luxury is often one of the most difficult parts of watch design. A key example of which is the debate between mechanical and quartz movements – mechanical movements are much cooler, more stylish and feel more luxurious but in every single performance metric, quartz outperforms them. The solution for many brands is to create separate watches that cater to both the style conscious collectors and those who require a practical tool. Case in point, the Omega 2024 America’s Cup releases. There’s the mechanical Seamaster Diver 300m and now the quartz Omega Seamaster Regatta.
While the Diver 300m is very stylish, at the end of the day it’s a time-only watch and there’s only so much that a watch with such a limited display can do. It’s the type of watch you might award to the winner of a regatta, not a watch that sailors would actually wear to compete. The Seamaster Regatta on the other hand is a veritable Swiss army knife of complications that are actually useful to sailors during the act of sailing.
The Omega Seamaster Regatta achieves this via an ana-digi display, a term meaning it has both analogue and digital timekeeping elements (Omega have visited this style of watch previously with models like the Spacemaster). The analogue part of the display is very straightforward as it’s the same as the Diver 300m with central hours, minutes and seconds that point to large, oversized hour markers coated with lume and a 60-minute timer bezel. However, the majority of the dial is given over to an hour-glass shaped LCD digital display and a pair of indicators either side of the central hands.
There are four pushers to operate the digital display allowing it to show a huge variety of information. It can display: universal time coordinated, two independent time zones, three alarms, a chronograph, a tachymeter, a telemeter, a pulsometer, a countdown timer, a regatta timer, a sailing log book, temperature and accelerometer. The indicator at 9 o’clock displays the current mode of the digital display while opposite at 3 o’clock is a moonphase. The level of practical information for a sailor is immediately obvious. Even the moonphase would be useful in terms of visual navigation at night.
The movement powering all of this is the brand new Omega Calibre 5701, a quartz movement with a two and a half year battery life. It’s housed inside a very large 46mm x 15.6mm case made from titanium, which is fortunate because the lightweight material will help to offset that huge size. The most bizarre aspect of the case is that it only has a 50m water resistance rating, which you’d expect to be higher for a watch design for use around the water, but I suppose the idea is that you stay on the boat, not in the ocean.
It’s priced at £7,000, which would be uncountenanceable for a standard quartz watch. But if a regular quartz watch is equivalent to a Smart car, this is the latest electric hyper car from Rimac. Cutting edge and designed with singular purpose in mind.
Price and Specs:
More details at Omega.
