With brands like Seiko slowly moving into more luxury territory every year, the number of proper accessible watch brands that combine good specs with great value is dwindling. However, one of the stalwarts of this sector of the industry is Tissot, who have just announced a major upgrade to one of their core dress watch collections. The Classic Dream Powermatic 80 introduces the Swatch Group’s flagship calibre to the dressy timepiece for the first time.
There are seven versions of the Classic Dream Powermatic 80 being introduced. They all measure 40mm x 10.23mm, putting them right in the sweet spot for a men’s dress watch – not as diminutive as many of the vintage proportioned designs we’ve seen this year but also not tool watch thick either. While all seven are made from steel, four of them feature gold PVD elements with two bi-colour editions and two full PVD pieces, with one option each in yellow gold and rose gold.
As for the dials, the steel tone models are available in black, blue and silver, the bi-colour in silver for both versions and the full PVD in silver for the rose and ivory for the yellow. The design itself is very classic with dauphine hands, facetted hour markers and a small minute scale around the edge. There’s also a date window at 3 o’clock so that you know what day it is when you wake up after cutting loose a bit too much at that evening soirée.
Of course, the big news here is the movement that’s housed inside. Instead of the typical quartz movements that, while accurate and accessible, give the watch the stilted motion of a deadbeat seconds, we have the mechanical Powermatic 80. Mechanical calibres have always had a sense of romance about them, not in a literal romantic sense but in the sense of reaching towards human ingenuity. It’s a core part of why we appreciate watches as artistic expression and like clockwork things, there’s a satisfaction to them that the sterility of electrical products can’t match. And for a dress watch, which is supposed to evoke similar emotions of the finer things in life, moving to a mechanical movement makes a lot of sense.
I accept that the above is probably a bit too grandiose of a statement for a sub-£500 beater, so let’s bring things back down to Earth again. The Powermatic 80 is a versatile movement used across the breadth of the Swatch Group and features in many of Tissot’s other creations such as the PRX . The headline figure is that is sports a power reserve of 80-hours, which greatly exceeds the typical reserve of equivalent movements from other Swiss or Japanese manufactures like Sellita and Miyota.
It’s always worth noting as well that there is some trade off as in order to achieve that reserve, they’ve reduced the frequency to 3 Hz compared to the standard 4 Hz you see from Sellita. In layman’s terms it’s simply beating less often, which means the hands move less often which can lead to a less smooth motion and reduced accuracy. Though that’s fairly nit-picky as 3 Hz isn’t an uncommon frequency for watches to use.
As for pricing, the Tissot Classic Dream Powermatic 80 Series is £408 for steel on leather strap, £430 for PVD on leather strap, £430 for steel on steel bracelet and £450 for bi-colour on steel bracelet. For a mechanical dress watch with 80-hour reserve, that’s probably the best value you’ll find anywhere.
Price and Specs:
More details at Tissot.
