Glashutte Original At Its Finest With the Senator Chronometer Watch

Glashutte Original may have an identity crisis being a German watch maker owned by the Swiss Swatch Group, but luxury German watches known their place. You might think that the brand strayed into some odd territory with some of their sport or retro timepieces, but a timepiece such as this German luxury watch making at its best. Why is that? Because it combines classic looks, a completely easy to read dial where function is certainly first, high quality hand construction, and interesting technical features meant to improve your life with a watch.

Part of me wants the watch to be an automatic – but this is very rare among watches of this breed. A beautifully decorated caseback to look at, as well as a power reserve indicator on the front of the watch make for a trade off that makes this manually wound movement timepiece easy to enjoy. Aside from the time, functions again include the power reserve indicator at the top, a large subsidiary seconds dial, a day/night indicator (small window in the power reserve area), a jumping big date indicator, and a zero-reset for the seconds when setting the watch. This makes is so that the seconds jump back to zero when you set the watch. This isn’t a new trick, but Glashutte Original has taken it up another notch. After you’ve pulled the crown out and the seconds dial goes to zero, adjusting the crown makes the minute hand travel in full minute increments. Sort of how it is done on a digital watch. This way you are really able to precisely set the watch. Very cool, and technically complex.

Another reason the above complication is a nice thing to have is how accurate the watch is, Glashutte Original’s dedicated the value of accuracy into this watch. They say that the Senator Chronometer is the first ever Glashutte Original watch to undergo COSC Chronometer certification. Which seems odd, but now that I think of it, most Chronometer watches aren’t German. If we are lucky, we will a great shift design focus form watches that just look great, to those that actually perform great as well.

Unlike say Japanese luxury watches, European luxury watches are just like their cars – beautiful and fun to use, but possibly prone to breaking. Does a finely tuned movement such as this have reliability to back up its high level of decoration? Looking at the movement we see  something very traditionally German, and quite typical of the region. Both A. Lange & Sohne and Glashutte Original are know to have a fancy for decorated balance wheel cocks, and almost fully exposed movements. Not sure about the little details such as size. But the watch case is in 18k rose gold, and there are likely to be other versions available as well. Nothing looks better than a large watch with a black Roman numeral print on a white dial and blued hands. Quite nice for a luxury watch and available globally soon.

By Ariel Adams

Tags: chronometer, glashutte original, senator, watch

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Watches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.