Jaeger-LeCoultre

time2tic
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wht d we really need under water ...

diver watches as primary tools for diving are as much part of the past than vintage fins or vintage regulators made popular by the cousteau team ( mistral regulators with 1 big hose on each side).

recreational divers that do a bit more dives than a couple of days a year on a nice sandy location all dive with diving computers, which occasionnaly tell the time ( suunto dive computers look a bit lke a seiko watch, are excellent and complete dive computers, have a size that is wearable outside a diving boat).  As divig computer they calculate during the whole dives the amount of nitrogen that is theoritically in your body, where the tables were assuming that you would dive at one depth for the whole dive and would not wonder around at differnet depths.

Therefore wearing a divers watch is more of a thing of the past, which quite a ew like to do. It is a bit like a bycicle. Most of the time, taking a car to go from A to B would be quicker and mre comfortable but a lot of people enjoy a bycicle ride without having a particular destination.

One will say that a divers watch can be used as backup, but if you have made a dive in the morning and did not write down the dive parameters, and you hope to use your dive watch to record dive time and calculate safety stops in the dive of the afternoon, it is simply impossible.

Having said that, what is very useful and not part of dive computer usually is to have a dive watch with a chronograph that is both functional at least til 100m depth and easy to read under water. typically one would want to extend the safety stops by adding one minute here or there for safety reasons. that is handy to time this extra time with a chronograph. However, you will fin that 99% of the chornographs sold amongst all brands, even when they are waterproof to 300m or much more, all contain in their manual a line that says: do not operate the chronograph pushers under water. The reason is simple: dynamic watertighness is much harder to guarantee than static watertighness.

I believe this sentence is also present in the manuals of the master compressor chrongraph (but one can correct me if I am wrong). However, I have been told that the pushers are very water resistant and could be operated without problems between 0 and 100m depth at least. I hve looked in details at the design of the pushers and it looks like the engineers/designers have done their job right and I would trust these pushers anytime.

It is again quite strange that one would sell diver chronograph rated to 1000m with pushers that in fact cannot be operated at a 10th of that depth without letting water in.

The race to the higher depth rating is quite meaningless in most cases. It would make more sense to make good diver chrono fully tested at 200m or 300m, but, this would mean costly engineering as well as fairly complex and expensive testing equipment to tests the chrono function of each watch under pressure, and would probably not appeal as much to the potential buyers as a big bold impressive number on the dial that reads: 1000m/3330ft or 2000m or more.