Review: Is the Seiko Mini-Turtle the New SKX007?

Seiko’s SKX007, the 42.5-millimeter vintage-inspired diver released in 1996, has been a huge hit globally—so huge that it has become the benchmark of affordable SCUBA watches for divers, journalists, and watch-heads alike. With an exceptional finish, reasonable size, classic style, high-performance specs, and an impossibly low price (typically below $200), it’s always been hard to beat the SKX007.

However, to the best of our knowledge, Seiko has discontinued the SKX007. Typical of the Japanese brand, they did so sometime recently without any announcement, and because new units are still available it was easy to miss the demise of this now-classic diver.

THE HEIR APPARENT

The end of the SKX007 raises the question whether Seiko had a successor in mind, and I think we all may have missed it by nick-naming 2017’s SRPC3/4x “Mini-Turtles.” The Mini-Turtle’s flanged case and hands resemble those of the larger Turtles (the 6309 from 1976 and reissued SRP77x from 2016)*, but the similarities, perhaps surprisingly, stop there. I submit that over time we all may come to regard the Mini-Turtle as the successor (or attempted successor) to the SKX007, rather than a little version of the Turtle.