Affordable Elegance. A Review of The Hamilton Jazzmaster Viewmatic ref H325151

I love the JLC Master Control.

There is something very alluring and classy about white-dialed watches. They seem so mid-century, and oftentimes perfectly straddle the line between dress and casual. I always feel like I look smarter and classier than I really am when wearing one, so I recently decided to reboot my search for a new white-dialed wrist companion.  My favorites have a few things in common: simple handsets, minimal dial fuss, 3-6-9-12 cardinal numerals, and a color that tends more toward ivory than bright white. The JLC Master Control Date most perfectly realizes my white-dialed watch ideal, and it’s been on my list of someday-definitely watches for years.

The archetype. JLC Master Control Date, image (c) Jaeger LeCoultre.

What about Omega?

I’ve written about my Dad’s Omega cal. 284 “Seamaster”-cased stainless steel watch. Everything about this watch is great — the ivory colored dial, the dauphine hands, the movement — but its 35 mm case size is a bit small for what I’m looking for in an all-occasions watch. I’ve often thought if this watch were 38 mm, it would be perfect. Then a couple of years ago, Omega announced its Seamaster 1948 LE, celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Seamaster line. And I thought, “Aha! I must have this watch.” But as I was engaged in that particular combination of lusting and scheming and rationalizing so familiar to watch lovers, I noticed something dreadful about it. The hands are bizarrely short, to my eye at least. Once seen, it cannot be unseen, and then all the other details that I’m not nuts about, but probably could’ve lived with, just piled on. Like the silly etching on the caseback, the overly wide bezel, the height of the watch, and the heavy duty lugs. Why, Omega, why?

Family heirloom Omega cal 284 (L) and Omega Seamaster 1948 LE (R), image (c) Omega.

So I returned to my on-again-off-again obsession, the JLC Master Control, probably named for the effect it has on my brain. I have loved this watch for a long, long time as an object of white-dialed watch perfection. I’ve never owned a JLC and it just seems like something I need to do at some point. The trouble with this watch, however, is its price tag relative to the state of affairs of my check book at any given moment.  

Auf Deutsch?

So my search continued. I checked in on my favorite German brands but concluded that, with one exception, the German makers just don’t get this style and vibe of watch. The exception would be the 38 mm Junghans Max Bill, a mid-century classic of its own, but I’d owned the chronograph version before and I just wasn’t feeling the Max Bill’s space saucer shape for my particular perceived need this time around. I’d still like a three-handed Max Bill someday, but it wasn’t right for me this time. So the search for an affordable JLC Master Control placeholder continued.

The Max Bill Auto, mid-century design perfection. Image (c) Junghans.

The Hamilton Thin-O-Matic.

Regular readers will know I like the Hamilton brand. I had owned the Hamilton Thin-O-Matic 38 mm twice before and still love it. The last one I had was actually bought as a life milestone gift for my kiddo, but I wore it a few times before giving it to him. He wears it on a Natural shell cordovan MIL style strap, which, unexpectedly perhaps, totally works. But if I’m being honest with myself, one of the reasons I broke up with the watch in the first place was because I had soured on the date window. It suffers from Hamilton Afterthought Date Window Treatment Syndrome. I find its placement and plainness just barely acceptable on the 38 mm Thin-O-Matic; it is quite frankly hideous and ghastly on the 42 mm version. But on the 38 mm watch at least, the lovely Art Deco details and great strapability make up for every other shortcoming on this watch. It really is that almost-perfect. Sadly, the Thin-O-Matic is no longer produced by Hamilton in the 38 mm case size, but the 42 mm carries on with its sore-thumb-ugly date window.

Pretty hard to beat. The Hamilton 38 mm Thin-O-Matic.

Well, I do like Jazz…

A perusal of Hamilton’s own website reminded me that I’d never owned any of the watches from the Jazzmaster collection. I’ve looked them over many times, but have never felt a strong enough connection to actually pull the trigger on one. However, this time around my eye landed on the Viewmatic. Hmm, 3-6-9-12 layout, Art Deco-ish numerals and indices, tasteful dial details, dauphine hands that aren’t too short, a very pretty and interesting case design, and a tasteful trapezium date window treatment. Yes! Thank you, Hamilton Design Team, for not screwing this up or assigning it to the Afterthought Date Window Department.

The Hamilton Jazzmaster Viewmatic 40 mm.

Offsetting this watch’s most immediately admirable qualities, initially at least, were the silver-white dial color and very pretty and interesting case design. Yes, you read that right, the case was both a plus and a minus for me. In the past, the sculpted, brushed and polished, multiple-pieces-pressed-together-looking case design hasn’t appealed to me. But for some reason that I can’t put my finger on, but possibly having to do with my fondness for classic jazz, I found it was speaking to me this time around. And dial color-wise, my initial take on it from pictures online was just wrong. It has a warmth and depth that is only seen in person. I thought the dial was going to be silvery white, but it’s really a warm, pearly ivory. It’s quite stunning for such an inexpensive watch.

Case details on the Viewmatic.

At this point in my search, my comfort with the Hamilton brand came together with this watch’s balance sheet of attributes and resulted in a cart-adding mouse click. I was a marketer’s dream on that particular Saturday morning it would seem.

The Viewmatic’s Details.

Let’s start with the face-on presentation of this lovely watch before moving on to life with it on your wrist. The dial has a lot going on, but I find it all comes together in a cohesive whole. It’s hard to pick my favorite detail, but I’m leaning toward the trapezium window that frames the date aperture. It’s very jazzy. The Art Deco-y indices that are shaped like elongated diamonds and groovy 6, 9, and 12 numerals are perfectly placed and proportioned. The dauphine hands are long and gracefully shaped, not stubby little triangles that make it hard to tell the time like those on the swing-and-a-miss Omega 1948 LE that costs nine times as much. The Viewmatic’s hand shape looks as though a pair of leaf hands and a pair of dauphine hands had puppies, and the inner lume plots are an echo of the hour indices’s shape.

The very jazzy trapezoidal date window treatment on the Viewmatic.

The textured center of the dial is also a really pleasing detail. Some video reviews I’ve seen refer to this area as “guilloche,” but when I ordered mine I was in serious doubt that a $775 watch would have an actual engine turned detail on it. But on the other hand, I thought, modern manufacturing is quite amazing, so who knows? But under the 8x advantage of my trusty Victorinox Explorer’s magnifying glass, you can clearly see that the pattern is actually an interlocking Hamilton “H,” so obviously not actual engine turning. Regardless, it’s cool and it makes the watch wear visually smaller than a whiteish 40 mm watch might otherwise, and it also reminds me of one of my other favorite instances of industrial design perfection, the scales of a Victorinox Alox SAK.

Not Guilloche. But maybe Guill-H?

The seconds hand is a long needle that just touches the seconds track. It’s rather perfectly done, and here we see a surprising detail for an “affordable watch.” There are three divisions between the seconds/minutes markers and the movement inside is in fact ticking away at a frequency of 3 Hertz. I’ve seen much more expensive brands, like Sinn for example, screw this up. In fact, on Hamilton’s own website they show a watch that has four divisions between markers, probably a holdover from when the watch was powered by a higher frequency ETA 2824.

Before my Viewmatic arrived, I was imagining what it might look like without its outer seconds track entirely and maybe reduced in size from 40 mm to 39 or 38. However, with the watch on my wrist, I can see that this alternate vision is a false one. You really don’t have to forgive anything here, or learn to live with this or that detail. Honestly, I think Hamilton just really nailed this one.

The Viewmatic’s wrist presentation.

Where luminescence is concerned, there are two things to consider with the Viewmatic. The first is that lume freaks aren’t buying Hamiltons, and the second is that it’s not uncommon for watches on the dressier end of the spectrum to have none at all. The Master Control, for example, has teensy weensy little lume dots at the hours, so it’s not like we are even compromising much compared to the benchmark watch here.

Now, about the Viewmatic’s case. As I mentioned, its multi-surface, multi-finish, apparently-but-actually-not-multi-piece construction has been a turnoff for me in the past. I finally just decided to try it, and what helped was realizing that the apparently pointlessly tacked-on business on the crown side of the case is really just the crown shoulders smushed flat. The crown lives down in the little nest thusly created to about a third of its height.  Where I used to see unnecessarily awkward, I now see gracefully and purposefully designed.  Again, very jazzy. The crown itself is a handsome, larger fellow with the block H logo and its operation is smooth and easy.

I’m sure there’s a French word for this style of case, but I don’t know what it is.

The different parts of the case that are set off with these hard creases have different finishes. The lugs are very finely brushed except on their chamfer where they are polished, like the center of the mid-case. The quality of the brushing is, quite frankly, amazing, and much better than I’ve seen on some of my darling German brands. The caseback is the eponymous see-thru affair, with the utilitarian H-10 in full view. Check it out once, then flip the watch back over and continue enjoying the “view” of the front.

The namesake caseback of the Viewmatic.

Living with the Viewmatic.

My Viewmatic arrived on a Saturday, and I wound and set the watch right out of the box and wore it 24/7 for a week. It never seemed out of place or mismatched to what I was doing. On the weekend I strapped it on for an errand to my local Jeep shop to check on a project. Even minor putzing in the garage helping my teenager mount a bike rack to his car for a buddies-riding-mountain-bikes-up-north adventure didn’t faze or ruffle the Viewmatic. I had just had new tires put on the Jeep Thing earlier that same day and came home to deflate them to the proper pressure (what is it with tire shops filling new tires to 50 psi anyway?), and the happy little Viewmatic seemed right at home playing Tool Watch in the light rain.

Relaxing jazzily with friends.

The Viewmatic is perfectly suited to my officey Mon-Fri work setting. In fact, dress yourself down a step for casual Friday and the Viewmatic on your wrist automatically bumps you back up a notch. But it does this without ever looking like you’re trying too hard, or like you went to a black tie event last night and just "forgot” to take your watch off. Haute horology it is not, but neither does it have a single grain of pretension. Its personality is elegant but not snooty, classy but playful. It just seems to effortlessly fit in with whatever you’re doing.

Although I never wear the factory-supplied strap with any watch, I will say that the one Hamilton includes with the Viewmatic is a real clunker. It has a nice appearance with its dark brown faux-alligator look, but in truth I’m not even sure it’s real leather. It has a very plasticky and cheap feel, whatever it is, but the color was just right so I made myself a shell cordovan Arts & Crafts strap in Horween’s Cognac color. If I say so myself, it’s perfectly matched to the Viewmatic.

I will give Hamilton credit for the color inspiration, but the factory strap has to go. Cognac Arts & Crafts is perfect.

Perhaps the Viewmatic’s single most noticeable deficit is the one it shares with most white-dialed watches, which is the difficulty you will encounter reading the time in low light. There is simply not enough contrast between the polished silvery hands and the pearly white dial to check the time in a darker setting. Even a lowly lit room can be a challenge, let alone actual darkness. But it’s easy to forgive the Viewmatic this foible given its many other charms and snazzy overall wrist personality.

The Viewmatic.

This is not the watch you’ll strap on for that weekend up north mountain biking trip with your buddies. But it might very well be the second one you stash in your overnight bag for the jazzy happy hour afterwards. You know, after riding all day and then cooling off with a swim in the lake, when you’ve changed into your favorite shorts or khakis, and someone busts out the shaker while someone else puts on Kind of Blue. That second watch.

This concludes my review of the Hamilton Jazzmaster Viewmatic. I always enjoy hearing from other enthusiasts, so please leave your comments below.