HAMBURG Chrono silver-satined silver / Field 20 stone grey

A satin silver dial is harder to make interesting than a colored one, because it has nothing to hide behind. The Sternglas HAMBURG Chrono solves it with finish rather than color.

HAMBURG is the collection in which Sternglas turns to its home city and to seafaring instrumentation, giving it bolder Arabic numerals than the brand's other lines, a fine outer minute scale, Luminova on the hands and indices, and a screwed caseback engraved with a Hamburg map showing the Alster, the Reeperbahn, the Speicherstadt and the Landungsbrücken.

The dial here is satin-finished silver: a coated brass base, sandblasted to a satin texture, gently domed, with a subtle gradation toward the edge that changes as the light moves. The case is 42 mm stainless steel and the strap is a Field nylon in stone gray, 1.5 mm on 20 mm lugs, fitted without tools. A Seiko/TMI VK64 meca-quartz chronograph runs the show, keeping time by quartz while driving the chronograph mechanically at five steps per second with a snap reset. There is a 24-hour register, a date at six, double-domed sapphire with double anti-reflective coating and 5 bar.

Gray on silver is a deliberately neutral choice. It goes with everything and dates with nothing.

Perfect for: silver dial chronographs, neutral gray strap watches, minimalist instrument-style watches.