Seiko

5 Sports Watches

The legendary Japanese watchmaker Seiko has been renowned for its high-quality and innovative watches for over a century. The Seiko 5 Sports watch released in the 1960s is one of the notable models. It was designed for the younger audience with a more active lifestyle as a more upscale model. 

The ‘’5’’ in its name represents the five key attributes that Seiko has incorporated in every Seiko 5 watch. Together with other models in the Seiko 5 series, the Seiko 5 Sports watch was one of Japan's first-ever automatic day-date watches. 

For over 50 years, Seiko 5 Sports has been passionately loved by mechanical watches lovers worldwide due to its high levels of reliability, durability and performance. To keep up with its glorious history, the company relaunched the Seiko 5 Sports collection with a whole new branding in 2019.

As of today, this Seiko sports watch has grown into a broad and versatile collection that can cater to every watch lover’s needs.  

As one of the oldest watchmaking companies in the world, we can trace the beginning of Seiko to way back in the late 1800s. The journey of the watch company Seiko began in 1881, when the young Japanese Kintaro Hattori, set up a store that sold and repaired timepieces in Ginza, Tokyo. With the growth of his business, Kintaro Hattori then established his first manufacturing factory “Seikosha” 11 years later, to produce the company’s own clocks. This is how Seiko paved its own way to its future success. 

Referring to “House of Exquisite Workmanship,” in Japanese, the company has been true to its name and produced countless innovative masterpieces including the world’s first quartz watches, kinetic, solar watches and popular mechanical watches. Many of its collections have been consistently popular in the international market such as Seiko Astron, Prospex, Presage, and of course the popular Seiko 5 Sports.

The Seiko 5 Sports collection was actually the descendant of the original Seiko 5 line which was first launched in 1963. The Seiko Sportsmatic 5 a.k.a Seiko 5 watch was the first self-winding wristwatch manufactured in Japan. Its name “5” refers to the 5 exceptional features of the watch: self-winding, the day-date display window at the 3 o’clock on the dial, impressive water-resistance, its durable case design and the iconic crown at the 4 o’clock position of the case. 

The Seiko 5 was a versatile watch collection that housed hundreds of watches with different designs, under a several lineups intended for different uses — Seiko 5, Seiko 5 Sports, Seiko Sportsmatic 5 as well as Seiko 5 Actus. This Seiko watches had been powered by a range of quality in-house automatic movements.

Seiko 5 watches are powered completely by their springs without use of electricity at all. The intricate mechanisms which achieve that feat are the fruits of the technical skills nurtured by Seiko during the brand’s 130-year history. The rugged functional design also incorporates the passion of all the people who have been involved in its development during the 50 years since Seiko 5 Sports first came into being.

Equipped with a timeless design and practical functionalities, these watches were meant as value-driven everyday watches that offer every essence a quality watch needs to have. They were regarded by many Seiko collectors as an excellent entry point into the Seiko watch family. 

Within the excellent and reliable sports watch family, a handful of models are holding values in the secondary market with high popularity, such as the SNXS77, the SNK381, and the famous SNK803. The Seiko 5 series has become a synonym to tasteful entry Seiko mechanical watches for the Seiko collectors from all over the globe.

The Seiko 5 series had long represented the core value in the foundation of Seiko’s enthusiasm on watchmaking innovations. Seeing the long-lasting popularity of the lineup, Seiko revamped and relaunched this consistently loved Seiko 5 as the new Seiko 5 Sports collection in 2019. While the old Seiko 5 models were referenced with SNK, the new Seiko 5 Sports models have references beginning in SRPD. 

Seiko has offered the best technology at a very budget-friendly price with its Seiko 5 Sports series. 

The newly relaunched Seiko 5 Sports watches are available in total 27 different models while fitting into 5 different sub-line which are the Seiko 5 Sports, Suits, Street, Sense, as well as Specialist. 

This collection was presented to be a spiritual successor to the famed Seiko SKX007. Although SKX007 was never officially included in the Seiko 5 collection, it is always considered as a dear brother of the series. Although SKX007 is now discontinued, it is said to be one of the best Seiko diver watches ever produced. Picking up the best elements of its signature dive watches, you can see many similarities of the SKX & SNK models with the new Seiko 5 Sports watch. 

The 27 new Seiko 5 sports diver models mostly vary in color and strap options but they all take faithful inspiration from the SKX in terms of the whole profile. These watches are all equipped with a 42 mm stainless steel case in 13.5 mm thick with a transparent case back. Other design elements such as the handset and indexes also resemble the dearly beloved SKX007. There are a number of options with different cases including standard stainless steel, rose gold plated steel and black hard-coating steel. 

One of the most distinctive updates on this watch is its new logo. The rebranding of this revived collection includes a modified “Sports” logo. To differentiate from the previous Seiko 5 traditional shield, the logo with the letter Snow looks like the “Superman” logo, as discussed on watch forums. 

The Seiko 5 Sports watches are indeed available in a wide range of dial color options including creamy white, black, blue, green, burgundy, orange, vintage black, vintage blue, vintage green, etc. Some dark dial color versions also offer different choices of contrasting design elements such as red indices, gold highlights, and even crackly topography. As for the bracelet options, there are several choices including a classic stainless steel bracelet, leather straps, and other materials such as mesh, nylon, and a combination of silicone and leather.