Casio this week expands its Edifice collection with a new Honda Racing Collaboration Model (EFS560HR-1A).
The new Edifice Honda Racing Collaboration Model (EFS560HR-1A).
Like previous Edifice Honda models, this latest solar-powered sporty chronograph watch is dressed with the colors of the Honda Racing team. The watch’s black Cordura band and red accents match the signature colors of the team.
In the same lane, the Edifice’s carbon fiber dial is meant to recall the look of an asphalt racetrack. The dial, resplendent with the Honda Racing logo, is also clearly marked with a gold reminder of the Edifice collection’s 20th anniversary.
In keeping with the Honda theme, the watch’s metal strap keeper and caseback are engraved with the Honda logo, where it joins the Edifice 20th anniversary logo.
The strap itself is covered with Cordura fabric with Kevlar fiber inserts.
As with all recent Edifice light-powered watches, this model’s solar charging system generates power using the light that enters through the inset dial openings. The watch will operate for up to six months of operation without exposure to light on a full charge.
Look for the Honda Racing Collaboration Model (EFS560HR-1A) in October at select retailers nationwide, as well as Casio.com. Price: $400.
Specifications: Casio Edifice Honda Racing Limited Edition
Case: 50.2mm x 45.4m x 10.3m mm steel with black ion plated bezel, sapphire crystal with non-reflective coating,
100-meter water resistance
Movement: Light powered Edifice quartz chronograph with elapsed time and 1st and 2nd place time displays, accurate to 20-seconds per month.Operating time from full charge until hands stop is approximately six months.
Dial: Carbon fiber, two hands (hour, minute), three chrono subdials (seconds, stopwatch minutes, stopwatch seconds), battery-level indicator.
Mention watches and traditional watchmaking, and you’d be forgiven for thinking of Switzerland, Germany or even Japan. But France, and more specifically Besançon, has perhaps one of the strongest histories of traditional watchmaking in the world. And when you think of French watches, the one brand that stands out above all others is Lip.
The view in Besançon, the center of French watchmaking.
Lip is indelibly linked to the French psyche much like Timex has been to those of us who grew up in the United States.
Lip has become something of a cult brand, even in the U.S. And for good reason. The Lip Mach 2000 is something of an anomaly among watch fans. If we are honest about it, in its current format it is essentially a quartz chronograph, and Lip has made few cosmetic changes to it.
The Lip Mach 2000
More than a watch
But this is a watch that demonstrates that a watch is far more than the sum of its parts. Think I’m kidding?
While in France I received a Facebook message from a fellow watch journalist stateside asking me to pick one up while I was there and bring it back for him. There are certain watches out there that hit visceral nerves, and for me Lip has a few models that speak to me on levels I can’t really quantify. They are emotional as much as pragmatic. Lip, at its very heart, is as much a feeling as it is a brand.
Lip is well known throughout the Francophone world, and famous with hard-core watch and design fans ache for the Mach 2000, as well as the now iconic Nautic Ski.
The Lip Nautic Ski
And the Nautic Ski is enjoying a best “second life” ever, with the return of smaller watches on the radar of most watch fans. When I visited Lip four years ago, the brand had been living sort of a diluted life, really treated by the (then) owners as only a brand label for watches and not the watch brand that Lip truly is.
Philippe and Pierre-Alain Bérard
Enter the Berards
At the time of my visit, the Berard family was producing Lip under a license, but had not yet fully taken formal control.
The Berards, Philippe and his son Pierre-Alain, have now taken full ownership of Lip – and have reinvigorated it. I am not here to criticize the previous owners. I am, however, here to applaud the Berards, and the entire team at Lip.
How do you manage a legend? Curious to relate, Lip stirs a lot of emotions in not only watch fans, but in the French consciousness. But prior to the Berard’s, that emotional connection was more of a sense of nostalgia. But have no doubts as to how serious they are taking their stewardship of Lip.
The latest Lip release, for example, underscores their commitment with a reissue of the Rallye Chronograph.Recently only available as a quartz piece, this new limited edition is much closer to the original with an automatic movement.
The new Lip Rallye Chronograph
The watch was announced recently as a pre-order item, and by all accounts it has been a pretty hot item.
The energy
In the years before the Berards, Lip was really not what it once was, or even what it could be.Since the Berards? I hate hyperbole, but walking around the streets of Besançon, Paris, and the offices and workshop at Lip, I really felt a new sense of energy and the passion. I really felt why Lipconnects on the level that it does with fans and the public at large.
It would be easy to do a Blancpain and “start from year zero,” but the team at Lip live in the real world, one where you don’t manufacture history. To that end, they have a rather unusual (in today’s watch world) department that handles vintage Lip questions, assessments, and if I understood correctly, possible restoration.
Inside the Lip Workshop.
And while it would be easy for the Berards to simply have bought the name and turn to a white label company for everything, it was very clear to me that Lip clearly represents something special to them, and I got that same feeling touring around the new facilities that they have installed for the watchmakers working on more complicated and vintage pieces.
Vintage Lip.
It is not enormous, but it is not insignificant either. And I think what is encouraging about it to me is that it represents the first step forward.
While it would be easy for Lip recreate itself as a reborn pricey brand, which is something it is not and never was, Lip has held the line on pricing. In a world where brands both big and small jack-up their prices only to jettison their unwanted stock to the grey market where it is discounted down to the bare bones, Lip offers something novel – a great watch at a fair price.
Now I realize that everyone wants to go to Switzerland to visit the historic Maisons, and that’s fair enough. But if you are really a fan of watches, history and culture I urge you to get yourself to Besançon and soak up all of the history and charm that this wonderful city has to offer.
James Henderson pens the Tempus Fugit website, where this article first appeared.
Eight years after Seiko debuted its GPS-connected, light-powered Astron, the Tokyo-based watchmaker launches a new Astron dedicated to Seiko’s founder Kintaro Hattori. The new Seiko Astron GPS Solar Kintaro Hattori 160th Anniversary watch commemorates Hattori with a special sixteen-facet zirconia ceramic bezel, representing one facet for each decade since Hattori’s birth.
The new Seiko Astron GPS Solar Kintaro Hattori 160th Anniversary Limited Edition.
This latest Astron, powered by the GPS-controlled Caliber 5X53, is a dual timer with automatic high-speed timezone adjustment (including Daylight Savings Time) while traveling in any time zone, with accuracy to 15 seconds per month even without receiving the GPS signal. The watch’s 42.8mm case and bracelet are made of titanium with a scratch-resistant coating. The watch’s dark hue, accented in gold, is meant to honor Seiko’s heritage.
Seiko has placed Hattori’s name and three reminders of his legacy on the case back, including the trademark “S” that he registered in 1900. His motto “One step ahead of the rest” appears above it near the name Seiko, which the company first used in 1924.
Seiko is offering the watch, a limited edition of 2,500, in a presentation box with a commemorative “S” mark badge and includes a card carrying a message from Kintaro’s great-grandson and the company’s current Chairman & CEO, Shinji Hattori.
The Seiko Astron GPS Solar Kintaro Hattori 160th Anniversary Limited Edition will be available in October, the month of Kintaro’s birth, at Seiko Boutiques and at selected retail partners worldwide. Price: $3,900.
Specifications: Seiko Astron GPS Solar Kintaro Hattori 160th Anniversary Limited Edition (Limited edition of 2,500)
Movement: Caliber 5X53 GPS controlled time and time zone adjustment, dual-time with AM/PM indication, perpetual calendar correct to Feb 2100 , automatic DST adjustment, high speed time zone adjustment , time transfer function , signal reception result indication, world time function (39 time zones), power save function. Accuracy: ±15 seconds per month (without receiving a GPS signal and at temperatures between 5°C and 35°C)
Case: 42.8mm x 15.6 mm titanium case with super-hard black coating zirconia ceramic bezel, dual-curved sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating, water resistance to 200 meters, magnetic resistance to 4,800 A/m,
Bracelet: Titanium with three-fold clasp with push button release. A crocodile strap is also included.
Just ahead of the re-opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on August 29, the museum and Bulova team up to celebrate the museum’s 150th anniversary in 2020 with the Bulova MET150 Edition, a special edition Bulova watch.
The Bulova Met150. Sales of the $295 quartz-powered watch benefit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The Bulova Met150 edition utilizes the historic Aerojet design silhouette from the 1960s, in 39mm stainless steel case with silver-tone crown and accents on a black dial. The quartz-powered watch features a three-hand calendar function, box mineral glass, and smooth grain black leather strap with red contrast stitching. Bulova places the Met logo is on the dial in the museum’s signature red hue.
The timepiece has launched digitally as part of The Met150 Edit on The Met Store website for Met members and will also be available at The Met Fifth Avenue once it reopens this Saturday, August 29. All proceeds from the sale of each watch ($295) will support the Museum’s collection, study, conservation and presentation of more than 5,000 years of art. Bulova, which since 2008 has operated as a separate brand within the Citizen Watch Corporation, was founded in New York City in 1875 and maintains its headquarters in the city.
In 2020, The Metropolitan Museum of Art is recognizing the 150th anniversary of its founding with a dynamic range of exhibitions and programs. Highlights of the year include “Making The Met, 1870–2020” and displaying new gifts throughout the Museum. More information is available at metmuseum.org/150.
After ten years of research, Bulova’s Accutron brand this week unveils a new type of watch movement that relies on electrostatic energy to help power its hands, and places the movement into two new Accutron watches.
The Accutron Spaceview 2020
The new watches, the Accutron Spaceview 2020 and the Accutron DNA, are the premiere models within the newly separated Accutron brand, and each feature designs that echo the dress of the historical Bulova Accutron Spaceview of the 1960s, the world’s first electronic watch (powered by tuning fork technology).
Accutron DNA models.
The movement
The new Miyota-built movement, which Bulova previewed in 2019, relies on both a power cell and on spinning turbines that react to the action of the wearer’s wrist to re-charge the cell.
The larger of the three electrostatic dial-side rotors, which is actually a motor, spins furiously while the watch is worn to directly power the seconds hand. The smaller two electrostatic generators, propelled by a more conventional rotor inside the movement, electrostatically charge the power cell, the integrated circuit and the quartz-based timing components that control the hour and minutes hands.
The watch’s energy is stored in an accumulator cell that powers two motors. Integrated circuits synchronize the motors to provide accuracy to +/- 5 seconds a month. Depending on how often the watch is worn, Accutron says it expects the electrostatic power feature will allow the watch to replenish its power for up to a decade without requiring a cell replacement.
In addition, Accutron has built a power-saving function into the new movement. After a certain period of inactivity, this function will stop the seconds hand to alert the wearer that power is being conserved. An even more comprehensive power-save feature, called the ‘energy conserving function,’ stops all of the hands, which prevents power from being depleted.
Two models
Both new Accutron watches display the same shade of green on bridges and/or case rings to clearly reference historical Bulova Accutron watches, notably the Accutron Spaceview.
The Accutron Spaceview 2020 Limited Edition, which is packaged with a special book on Accutron.
The Spaceview 2020 most directly recalls the open, avant-garde design of the original Spaceview, which offered a clear view of its tuning fork electronics.
The new watch offers a 43.5mm stainless steel case and clear case ring with dot-shaped primary hour markers, fit to a black leather strap. A limited edition Spaceview 2020, with a green case ring, will also be available packaged in a deluxe box set with an illustrated book “From the Space Age to the Digital Age.”
Bulova took a few more liberties when designing the Accutron DNA, which offers a more contemporary adaptation. The Accutron DNA case ring is a sportier with its squared primary markers and its sapphire crystal is domed. Case ring color choices of green, blue, black or gold-tone offer more variety.
The new Accutron DNA
In addition, the Accutron DNA is attached to the wrist with what appears to be a nicely integrated black rubber strap, and the watch’s case is also larger, measuring 45.1 mm in diameter.
