Feature: Seiko vs Grand Seiko: Dive Watches

By Craig Hawes

You want a dive watch, from Japan, and you’ve got a budget of somewhere between a few hundred dollars and over ten thousand. Do you pick a Seiko or a Grand Seiko? Let’s find out.

Seiko 5 Sports SRPD71K1

Think about this: the Seiko 5 SRPD costs less than a meal for one at Heston Blumenthal’s experimental restaurant, The Fat Duck. Whilst The Fat Duck experience may last several hours of mind-bending gustatory pleasure, by the time a day has passed, the experience will have quite literally left your system.

This is not the case with the SRPD. Its impression is a little more permanent than that. For $350, you can enjoy a mechanical dive watch from one of history’s most famous dive watch manufacturers, and that, to me, is perhaps even more incredible than the most inventive platypus toenail sundae that Heston could ever concoct.

Originating from the first Seiko diver in 1965, the SRPD gallantly holds the fort on affordable, high-quality watchmaking, and even though some of the specification has slipped a little over the years to keep it competitive, it is still very much a dive watch. It’s not ISO rated, but it’s still capable of a healthy 100m. If that was good enough for the original Rolex Submariner, I’m sure it’s fine for wearing at a desk.

And not only is it good for wearing, it’s good for admiring, too. Unlike some past Seiko divers, which have very much been about form over function, this lets its hair down a bit with a flash of steel and a pop of colour. It’s a watch you can choose with your personality and not just your profession. With the SRPD, people won’t mistake you for a member of the Super Army Soldiers.

It’s pretty at the back as well as the front—ooh err—thanks to the updated calibre 4R36, which given Seiko’s enormous efforts to mass-produce watch movements, is entirely mechanical, entirely automatic and entirely affordable. It’s bizarre to think that one of the largest producers of microelectronics in the world, the same company that made mechanical watches obsolete, is now up there as one of the biggest manufacturers of spring-powered watch mechanisms. I guess that’s what you’d call irony.

It’s not all unicorns and fairy dust, though. At $350 I’m sure there isn’t an expectation for top-notch quality across the board, and so the notable absence of a sapphire crystal—replaced with Seiko’s proprietary mineral glass formulation called Hardlex—luminous bezel pip and screw-down crown won’t hit too hard. Dig out another hundred dollars and you can, quite simply, have it all.

The overarching theme of the Seiko 5 SRPD isn’t that it’s a great watch for $350, though. Thanks to a decent spec and build quality combined with a characterful design and ogle-able movement, it is an outright great watch that just so happens to cost $350. So, if you can get all that for $350, what can you get for another $10,000 or so?

Grand Seiko SLGA001

If the Seiko 5 SRPD is a nice day out at the seaside, the Grand Seiko SLGA001 is an all-expenses-paid, month long expedition to Chernobyl. It is big. It is built like a sarcophagus. It is overengineered to such a high degree that it makes the F-35 Lightning look like a kite. If you want a diver that is the ultimate in every single way, this is it.

With 600m of water-resistance, you might be thinking that there are other dive watches out there that boast greater depth-defying dive ratings, and there are. Given that the deepest a human has ever gone unprotected by a vehicle is 700m, the Grand Seiko seems about right. Anything else is all just a bit pointless. Until James Cameron’s death-defying submarine can learn to read the time from the watch bolted to its robotic arm, the SLGA001 has got you covered.

So, what makes the SLGA001 the ultimate of ultimates? Well, because watchmaking isn’t just about function, its about execution as well. Dive watches, the SRPD included, tend to be built for purpose, foregoing any kind of traditional finesse in lieu of outright performance. Fine polishing and intricate detailing hardly matter when you can barely see your hand in front of your face and your lungs are the size of golf balls.

But that’s not Grand Seiko’s style. The “Grand” really does mean grand in every respect, and so the SLGA001 gets a level of attention to detail that is almost unheard of in the segment. If you’re familiar with Grand Seiko you won’t need me to tell you that microscopic perfection comes standard with this watch.

The hulking 47mm titanium case may be more Joint Strike Fighter than jewellery, but that doesn’t mean Grand Seiko has skimmed the same care and attention it bestows upon its more civilian efforts. If Invicta were bought out by Patek Philippe, this is what would result. That same attention to detail applies practically as well as aesthetically, with Grand Seiko spending the time and effort manufacturing protection against helium ingress so it doesn’t need an unsightly and compromised escape valve.

And we haven’t even got to the best part, because hiding beneath that titanium case back is the calibre 9RA5, a five-day Spring Drive movement that borrows from the hallowed Credor school of design and finishing—and you can’t even see it! What greater flex is there to have such a feat of engineering and artistry and to leave it entirely to the owner’s imagination? Still, they’ll appreciate the smooth sweep and the 10 second-per-month accuracy.

The SLGA001 celebrates 60 years of Grand Seiko, founded to turn Seiko up to eleven and best the Swiss in every way possible. If you want a diver that still does that, this is what you’re looking for. By performance, quality and engineering, it is exactly what you’d expect for $11,000.

Name me one other watchmaker that can demonstrate such a dichotomy. It’s comparisons like this that make it clear that Seiko is one of the only brands that truly cares about what it does, unabashedly catering for every budget and preference. I used to hear the criticism of Grand Seiko that it was “just” a Seiko, but given how important Seiko was and continues to be, I’d say that’s the greatest compliment the brand could receive. So, between the Seiko 5 SRPD and the Grand Seiko SLGA001, which is best? Well, let me put it this way: if you could afford the SLGA001, you wouldn’t sell your SRPD to get it.

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