People who know me are aware that I’m not much of a vintage watch guy. Though, in my increasing maturity, I do find myself interested in older watches that interest me. I’ve come to find that I employ a sort of rule when it comes to vintage timepieces that I am keen on. For the most part, I am only interested in older watches that came out during my lifetime, and that of course have aesthetic elements and stories that I value. One such watch is the Seiko Sports 100 7A28, which during its roughly 10 year production run was released in about 40 different versions. Keen on owning one for a long time, my dream (more like a box I needed to check) came true a few months ago with most of the thanks going to good ol’ eBay.
The Seiko 7A28 particular copy watches, but is actually a movement. Though watches with the caliber 7A28 movement had the name of the movement in the name of the watch – even though they had other reference names as well. For example the particular model I got is known as the Seiko 7A28-7060 as well as the Seiko SPR025J1 – and apparently it is incredibly rare (as well as really cool).
Let me first explain the technical appeal of the 7A28. This is important because outside of being featured in many seriously iconic 1980s futuristic watches, the 7A28 movement was sort of a big deal. More so, Seiko doesn’t event produce anything like it anymore. The 7A28 movement was the world’s first quartz analog chronograph movement – brought to you by the same company that first released an analog quartz watch in 1969 with the original Seiko Astron.
While the performance of the 7A28 isn’t exactly breathtaking by today’s standards, it is still a very impressive movement, and its production quality and features are still better than most of today’s far more cheaply produced quartz chronograph watches. We are starting to see it happen more and more, but just you wait because 1970s and 1980s era quartz movement-based watches (the good stuff) are going to be an upcoming craze among watch collectors. It might not happen tomorrow and you aren’t likely to see bored rich guys attempting to impress one another by spending a million dollars on them… but sooner or later these are going to really go up in value.
A good reason that Seiko 7A28 replica watches (and timepieces like it) are going to go up in my value (in my opinion) is that finding ones in good condition is incredibly tough. Why? Because people wore these watches for years! In fact, good condition Seiko watches from long ago are often hard to find in general because they were too good. What does that mean? It means that people wore them for years, often until they wore out. So you can imagine my delight in finding this otherwise incredibly rare Seiko 7A28-7060 in NOS (new old stock) condition. It even still has the remnants of a blue plastic sticker on the case back. More on the watch in a bit after I finish talking about the movement.