Don't miss the next drop
What the dial asks you to believe sits on its fourth line: Officially Certified Chronometer. Plenty of vintage watches make that claim on printing alone. This Seamaster backs it with the movement, and in our opinion the caliber 564 turning beneath this sandblasted dial is the most quietly accomplished automatic Omega built in the 1960s.
The Seamaster name goes back to 1948, when Omega adapted the sealed, water-resistant cases it had supplied to the British forces during the war into a civilian dress watch. By the back half of the 1960s the line had grown into a broad family, and the chronometer-certified automatics sat at the top of it, the everyday Omegas held to the tightest standard the brand published.
That standard is the whole point of the caliber 564. It belongs to Omega’s 56x series, the full-rotor automatics with date that arrived in the second half of the decade, and within that family the 564 is the chronometer grade, adjusted to five positions and submitted to the official Swiss bureaus for the rating the dial records. Its non-certified sibling, the 565, is mechanically close and shared the same cases, which is exactly why the certification matters: the 564 is the one Omega put through the extra work. Twenty-four jewels, a 19,800 beat, and a serial in the 29.3 million range that places this example around 1968. The movement photographs show the copper-toned bridges, the rotor signed OMEGA WATCH Co SWISS, and the caliber number stamped beneath the Omega logo.
The case is the cushion-shouldered form Omega favored for these later Seamasters, 36.5mm across, 42mm from lug to lug, on 19mm lugs, wearing its years in honest hairlines across the brushed flanks. The crown is Omega signed. Turn it over and the smooth outer back carries the raised Seamaster hippocampus, the seahorse medallion the line has worn since the 1950s. Open it and the inner caseback reads ACIER INOXYDABLE around the OMEGA WATCH Co triangle, then FAB. SUISSE and SWISS MADE, with two references stamped below: 168.022 over 166.028. That pairing is not an error. 168.022 is the chronometer reference, the case as fitted with the 564; 166.028 is the standard-movement version that shared the identical case. The movement inside settles which watch this is.
The dial is the reason to stop here. It is a sandblasted silver-white, a matte grained surface that scatters light instead of reflecting it, and decades have brought a soft warmth and a faint scatter of foxing across the field that we read as age rather than fault. The applied Omega logo sits above AUTOMATIC, CHRONOMETER, OFFICIALLY CERTIFIED in fine black print, Seamaster in script above six, and T SWISS MADE T at the foot, the tritium signature this dial left the factory carrying. Faceted baton markers and matching hands hold their original finish, and the date clicks through a window at three.
We have paired it with an olive Ostrich strap on an OTTUHR signed buckle, a quiet, textured green that lets the matte dial stay the headline without competing for it.
Serviced in-house at OTTUHR and backed by our 2-year mechanical warranty, this is the Seamaster for the collector who would rather own the certified movement than the lookalike that merely resembles it. Compact, understated, and properly adjusted, it does the rare thing for a watch of its age: it still means exactly what its dial says. To us, that is the whole appeal.
