Review: Sternglas Tachymeter Blue

I won’t deny being slightly snobbish towards quartz watches. I’m also no fool and I will happily recommend them to friends who just want a durable watch that tells the time and don’t want to spend more than a few hundred bucks. My proclivity for mechanical watches is eclipsed by my appreciation for the entirety of the watch world and all it has to offer. Sometimes there’s a good design that deserves a closer look, and sometimes that design is a chronograph with a quartz movement. That’s how I ended up with the Sternglas Tachymeter Blue for review.

The color combination is what gets you first: the grey-blue-green against the black dial, and that pop of reddish orange. And the rings around the pushers, red and black. Further, you’re expecting a lightweight “dinky nothing” (as my son calls such things), but the Sternglas Tachymeter has an unexpected if not substantial presence; it does not feel cheap.

The Case

The case is a straightforward affair, with sharp edges and brushing throughout. I especially like the circular brushing on the top of the lugs, which is like a ripple from the fixed tachymeter bezel. The push-pull crown is easy to grip and operate and marking the pushers adds some fun color and helps distinguish them. The action to the pushers, though, is a bit uneven. There’s a pronounced click after relatively substantial pressure for start and reset, but almost no tactile feedback when stopping the chrono. It’s the only thing that did feel cheap about the watch.

For a watch with a 50mm lug-to-lug, the Sternglas Tachymeter wore surprisingly well on my 7-inch wrist. Three things are at play. First, the sloped bezel gives the appearance of the case easing onto the wrist. This is reinforced by the angled lugs, which do the same both visually and physically, grabbing the wrist on both sides. Finally, there’s a small cutaway on the underside of the case that reduces how pronounced the case would be if it were simply slab-sided.

The Dial

The dial of the Sternglas Tachymeter Blue was apparently inspired by the Furka Pass in Switzerland, a scenic series of cutbacks in the Alps that was used in the James Bond film Goldfinger (Bond in his Aston Martin DB5 has a somewhat playful car chase through the cutbacks with Tilly Masterson in her Ford Mustang, until Bond uses one of the DB5’s gadgets to literally tear through Masterson’s car). Looking at a photo of the pass, I actually believe Sternglas’ claim of inspiration: The sky is a striking blue, while the valley below is a deep green, with the white of snow-topped alps separating the two; the black of the dial calls to mind the road that cuts through the landscape. The only color missing from the landscape of Furka Pass is the reddish orange that provides a pop to the dial.

Both the central dial and the slightly lower outer ring feature a slight graining to them, which is welcome texture against the flat finish of the subdials. The 3 and 9 o’clock subdials are recessed to the same depth as the chapter ring, which features nicely polished hour markers aligned with the curiously alternating printed markers in the center dial. Other than an extra dash of color, I’m not clear why the red arc exists along the chapter ring. Perhaps Sternglas is telling us if something isn’t going 180 units per hour, it’s simply not worth timing: “You must be this fast to be cool.”

The dial makes excellent use of the various colors to provide contrast everywhere. Given the palette, it’s not a hard task to balance vibrancy and legibility, but one Sternglas has accomplished no less. Praise be to the color-matched date wheel perfectly positioned within the hours totalizer at 6 o’clock. As far as the 24-hour subdial, I’m unfazed. I know some hate it and see it as a waste of space, but it’s harmless and balances the dial.

Just below this text is where you’d normally see a lume shot, and I bet you were expecting one. I was, too. Imagine my surprise and disappointment when the UV torch didn’t light anything up. Why have the slivers of white on the hands? Why have the white pips at the outer ends of the applied hour markers? What a confusing design decision for a tool watch. It may not be a diver, but the lume plots are there, begging to be used. Instead, we are left with empty suggestions of what could have been.

The Rest

Not just a cheap quartz housing, the caseback is screwed in and features an etched depiction of the Furka Pass we’ve been chatting about recently. The movement isn’t anything special but he chronograph mechanism does have a quick reset: unlike many run-of-the-mill quartz chronographs that take a slow trace of the dial to get back to zero, it snaps back when the reset pusher is actuated. The battery has a 5-year life, though the chronograph can only time up to 12 hours so what good is such a long battery?

Look at all those straps! Despite the Furka Pass color scheme, the dominant tones are black and steel, making this an easy watch upon which to rotate straps. The green quick-release strap that comes with the watch is supple and seems of decent quality.

For the Sternglas Tachymeter, I’d say you get a bit more than what you pay for, but the chronograph itself won’t compete with mechanical movements and the lack of lume is baffling. The overall design, however, is among the best of any colorful chronograph I’ve seen, and you have to give Sternglas credit for having a legitimate inspiration instead of, say, some questionably specific forest. For the wearability and amount of character, you could do a lot worse than the Sternglas Tachymeter, and I’m frankly not sure you could do much better at this price. If you’re so inclined, you can check out the Sternglas Tachymeter page—it also comes in black and yellow (black and yellow).