Seiko 5 Automatic Men Watch SNKK87 - The Cheapest of the Seiko White Knights, A Review (plus Video)

By now you would have guessed that I love white dialed watches. One of my themes for my watch collection is the Seiko White Knights series – these are Seiko watches with white dial (or part thereof), round casing, automatic or hybrid (powered by rotor), three hands, crown at 3 o’clock and paired with a bracelet. With this SNKK87, I will have five under this grouping.

This time around I decided to search via eBay. I found a seller out of Singapore and I promptly made the necessary payment. Payment was made on 9 April 2018 for RM346.67. The package arrived via normal Airmail on 23 April 2018.

 

The SNKK87 model came out in 2013. It has a case diameter of 38.0 mm without the crown and 40.5 mm with the crown. Thickness is 10.5 mm. Lug width is 20.0 mm and the lug-to-lug length is 43.0 mm. The watch is made out of 316L stainless steel with polished and brushed surfaces. It comes with a display case-back. Both the dial window and the case-back window are made out of Hardlex crystal. Paired with a stainless steel bracelet, the whole watch weighs in at slightly less than 100 grams.

This model has a simple yet effective dial design. The scale has a combination of line markers for the minutes and rectangle polished plate for the hours. At the inner-end of the hour markers, a small dot of luminous paint, LumiBrite is added for night referencing. The 3 o’clock marker is replaced with a date and day aperture in a polished framed. The date and day wheels have a white background to commensurate with the white dial. For this particular model, the date wheel has a choice of English or Spanish. Meanwhile, the hands and hour markers are also coated in LumiBrite for low light use.

On the dial itself, there are 5 lines of texts and logo. The upper quadrant has the brand name and the series logo. The rest are located in the lower quadrant.

Overall, the dial is uncluttered and easy to read.

The bracelet has a 20.0 mm width at the lugs and tapers down to 18.0 mm at the clasp. The clasp is a simple fold over push button release design with the brand and series logo stamped on it. The links uses the spring clip system and 3 micro adjustment points are provided in the clasp itself. Do note that the parts in the bracelets such as the links and all are made from stamped sheet metal and folded, not machined (i.e. solid). As such, it does rattle and feels cheap. Replacing the standard bracelet with a leather or canvas strap would be preferable and makes it more refine.



Resizing is simple yet delicate as you need to use something sharp and any slip could cause scratching. Above you can see how metal sheets are bend to make the various link components for the bracelet. Looks cheap, feels cheap but once assembled and on a wrist, it belies its true nature.

The display case back allows one to see the workings of the Seiko’s iconic automatic workhorse, the Caliber 7S26. This movement uses 21 jewels and beats at 21,600 BPH or 3 Hertz and is undecorated. The movement has a 43 hour power reserve and doesn’t feature seconds hand stop mechanism (or hacking) nor manual winding option.

The casing design and manufacturing tolerances only allow a 3 ATM or 30 meters of water resistance.

The Series

There are eight members under this particular sub-series. The SNKK87, SNKK89, SNKK91, SNKK93, SNKK94, SNKK96, SNKK98 and SNKL02. The differences lie in the dial, strap and case colours.

SNKK87

SNKK89

SNKK91

SNKK93

SNKK94

SNKK96

SNKK98

SNKL02

The Wearing Experience

This is a light watch and the sub-40.0 mm size allows it to be used by practically anyone, young or old, man or woman. The price point allows it to be classified as a ‘beater watch’ since you will not lose sleep over it if it suffered superficial damage (or even catastrophic) in your day-to-day wearing.

Despite that, this watch has the lines that make it passable as an ‘elegant’ dress watch as well. Below is a video of the watch on my wrist.

Seiko’s White Knights

 

Seiko recognizes the different market strata in terms of affordability. The brand makes it a point to service all strata with models that are generally similar. Creating a model (albeit different quality, material etc) with the same core DNA at many price levels makes it inclusive and delights a large swathe of the fan base.

The “Seiko White Knights” is a particular theme that I chose due to my love for white dialed watches. There is nothing unique about them. You can, if you wanted to, go for “Seiko Black Knights”, watches with black dial instead. Based on my own criteria (highlighted earlier in the first paragraph of this review), I have identified some of the watches that fit the criteria in a number of series. Although there could be more in other series, in this case, Seiko has at least one in the Kinetic series, the Seiko 5 series, the Spirit series, the Presage series and the Grand Seiko series. I was lucky enough to be able to collect them. These watches (apart from the SNKK87) are tabulated below. 

Seiko Kinetic SKA475P1 (http://easternwatch.blogspot.my/2014/01/seiko-kinetic-ska475p1-comfortable.html)	Seiko Spirit Automatic SARB035 (http://easternwatch.blogspot.my/2018/03/seiko-spirit-automatic-sarb035-jdm.html)
Seiko Presage SARX055 (http://easternwatch.blogspot.my/2017/11/seiko-automatic-presage-sarx055.html)	Grand Seiko SBGA011 Spring Drive (http://easternwatch.blogspot.my/2016/08/seikos-grand-seiko-sbga011-spring-drive.html)

Since there are other models in other series under Seiko that I have yet to identify, the acquisition of the SNKK87 will not be the last for this collection theme.

Photo Gallery