Which Seiko is right for you?

You’ve spotted several models and you can’t decide. That’s normal: Seiko makes very different watches, and the most beautiful one isn’t necessarily the one that will suit you.

Three questions are usually enough.

1. Will you wear it every day, or now and then?

Every day, or nearly → an automatic.
No battery: it winds itself from the movement of your wrist. Its seconds hand sweeps instead of ticking, and that is a genuine pleasure to watch. Its only drawback: leave it off for a day and a half or two and it stops, so you have to reset the time.

Now and then, or you own several watches → a quartz or a solar.
Pick it up after three weeks and it is still on time. Nothing to think about.

2. Does changing a battery bother you?

No, it doesn’t bother me → quartz.
One battery every two or three years, that’s all. Unbeatable accuracy, and often a slimmer case.

Yes, I want zero upkeep → solar.
It recharges from any light, not just sunlight. No battery to change in normal use.

One nuance on pre-owned solar watches: they recharge normally, but if you leave the watch for months in a dark drawer, it will need a good day of light before it starts again. Nothing serious, but worth knowing.

3. Do you like busy dials, or clean ones?

Busy, with counters and a graduated bezel → a chronograph.
This is the dial with life in it: small counters, a chronograph hand, often a tachymeter bezel (to measure speed) or a slide rule. At Seiko you’ll find excellent alarm chronographs for a very reasonable budget.

Clean, understated, discreet → a classic three-hander.
Hours, minutes, seconds, sometimes the date. It goes anywhere, under a shirt cuff or at the weekend. The kind of watch you never tire of.

Somewhere in between, tough and legible → a diver.
Large luminous markers, rotating bezel, a sporty look. A word of caution: on a pre-owned watch, the diver style does not mean it can still go in the water — the gaskets have aged. Washing your hands, no problem; the swimming pool, no.

In short

One last piece of advice, and the most important: measure your wrist before you fall for anything. Under 16 cm, aim for 36-39 mm. Between 16 and 18 cm, 38-42 mm work very well. Above that, anything goes. The diameter is listed on every one of our product pages.

And if you are still torn between two pieces, write to us. We’ll tell you honestly which one will suit you better — even if that means talking you out of the more expensive one.

→ See the watches available