The flip-over case certainly made it stand out, though it was by no means unique – for the steep and un-Hamilton-like price of £4,000+ you could have picked up one of Jaeger-LeCoultre’s more classic and enduring Reversos instead.Ī sequel followed in 2016 – the Jazzmaster Face 2 Face. With its elliptical case and eccentric dial, it most closely resembled Audemars Pigeut’s Millenary collection. The brand released the first Jazzmaster Face 2 Face in 2013, and it was a peculiar thing from the off. Hamilton’s website currently offers 402 different Jazzmasters (though some have been discontinued), with multiple dial options – more than 1,000 individual models. Jazzmater is the brand’s line of “contemporary, modern watches”, a broad category of automatic dress watches, some of which come with conspicuous details like power reserve indicators or ‘open’ dials that show off sections of their movement, and mostly sit in the sub-£900 bracket. Into that left-field bucket we may add the Jazzmaster Face 2 Face. It’s 1972 Pulsar put a red LED display into a solid gold case and sold the resulting ‘space age wrist computer’ for £1,700 – at the time more than a gold Rolex. The aforementioned Ventura was the world’s first battery powered watch and came in a “shield-shaped” (ie: triangular) case. Hamilton also has form when it comes to throwing out leftfield ideas. One is a long history in producing watches for Hollywood, for which it has amassed more than 500 credits, more than any other brand – Elvis wore a Hamilton Ventura in 1961’s Blue Hawaii, while the plot of 2014’s Intersteller hinges on a Khaki Field Murph, partly designed by the film’s director Christopher Nolan, a more compact reedition of which was one of our favourite watches of last year. Today Hamilton does brisk business with accessibly-priced models across all the categories you’d expect – dive watches, field watches, pilot watches.īut its story also has a couple of quirks.
#Hamilton jazzmaster face2face price series
The Hamilton Jazzmaster Face-2-Face III comes with a backstory.īetween 18 Hamilton was an American company, before a series of mergers and acquisitions bought it under the control of the Swiss giant the Swatch Group – home to Omega, Breguet, Blancpain, Rado and others. The pushers are also flipped – so the lower pusher starts and stops the chronograph function, and the upper resets it. The non-time-telling side features an inner track printed with a tachymeter (to measure speed, or any activity within a one-hour period) and a pulsometer (for measuring heart rate).Īll the scales are printed counter-clockwise since the chronograph – which Hamilton calls a “passing through chronograph seconds hand” – rotates ‘backwards’ on this side of the case. Which side you choose to display is determined by the job you’d like the watch to perform. It contains two movements, one for each side. The stainless steel case is housed in a hinged ‘cage’, and rotates on its horizontal axis so the watch flips over (hence ‘Face 2 Face’). It features a double-sided dial concept – one that tells the time and has a chronograph function, the other featuring three measurement scales. The watch itself is as thought-provoking as its title. What part of that name is the most troubling? The substitution of a number for a perfectly good word, as per a 1980s rap group? The use of a Roman numeral to flag this is the third itineration of a family, the sort of thing the grandson in an American business dynasty might find themselves saddled with at birth? The word ‘Jazzmaster’? Or perhaps the combination of all three? A Ripples? A Ripple? The Ripples?”īrace yourselves, then, for a new release from the mid-range watch brand Hamilton – the singularly-titled Hamilton Jazzmaster Face-2-Face III. People at watch-geek gatherings will ask ‘What’s that? And you’ll have to say ‘It’s a Ripples’. “It makes people think of ice cream, or chocolate bars, and it sounds quite a lot like dribbles, or triples, or nipples. Alas, it was a thumbs down for Speake-Marin, the high-end independent brand that had recently announced its entry into the luxury stainless steel watch market with a model it called Ripples.
Among those singled out for Chris’s approval were Breitling’s Galactic, Junghans’ Chronoscope and Rolex’s Migauss (“Love the new-age-of-technology vibe”). Writing on his excellent Substack The Fourth Wheel, the watch journalist Chris Hall recently considered the names brands give to their products.
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