Seiko automatic tuna professional#

They decided to make clean slate of the past and to design something new, following here different technical solutions, compared to Rolex for example. The same issue dealt from Seiko on a different level. The 1965 Seiko 62MASĪt that time, Rolex (with the Submariner and later the Sea-Dweller), Doxa and Omega (with the Ploprof – the watch and its development are explained in detail here) were the first to work on the Helium Gas problem, that divers faced during their saturation dives (Please hold for a future article on that).

Seiko automatic tuna professional#

Ikuo Tokunaga and his team started to develop this new watch in 1968, from scratch, in order to create the perfect professional diver’s watch – something that took them seven years. A group of engineers from Seiko, who read this letter with great interest, realized the problem and decided to produce something else, a watch that could withstand all the problems of professional diving. In that letter, he complained that Seiko Divers watches often filled with helium and lost their crystals in saturated environments. Concerning the Tuna, all started in 1968, when the company took a letter from a saturation diver from Kure City, in Hiroshima prefecture. However, diving and scuba changed rapidly – the conditions the divers had to face were also rapidly evolving. These three models were considered excellent, as they embodied all the lessons the company had learned up to that point. Seiko produced its first diver’s watch in 1965 (62-MAS). First, we must look back in the past and have a closer look at the history of the Seiko Tuna Prospex (Professional specifications). I belong to the second category and I decided to take my own Seiko Tuna with me, during my summer vacations, for an in-depth review – but that’s going to be the second part of this article. Many however manage to explain its main purpose and its significance seem to become hooked. There are countless posts on Internet about it – and some where people seem to misunderstand its importance and to discard it as an ugly watch. The Tuna, or Tuna-can as watch aficionados’ call it, is a watch that carries no compromises. Introduced in 1975 in a mechanical form, it was upgraded in 1978 with a quartz movement, after a Japanese saturation diver sent a letter of complaint. Few watches possess the aura and the character of the Seiko Tuna.