The Seiko King Turtle: Does This Budget-Friendly Diver Reign Supreme?

Japan’s Seiko has never been shy about going bold and unconventional with its designs, especially when it comes to its divers’ watches, a genre in which the brand has been an undisputed industry pioneer since the 1960s. One of its most off-the-wall and yet most enduringly popular designs is the so-called Turtle, which made its debut in the 1970s and has undergone a successful renaissance here in the 21st Century as part of Seiko’s rugged and sport-centric Prospex line. At the pinnacle of the Turtle sub-family, in terms of luxurious  finishing and dominant wrist presence, is the grandly named King Turtle, best represented by the Refs. SRPE03 and SRPE05 released in 2019. Here’s what you should know about them.

By the time this watch’s ancestors made their debut, Seiko had already produced some highly unusual, unexpectedly iconic, and cleverly nicknamed dive watches, like the Ref. 6159 “Tuna” (for its chunky tuna-can-like case shape) and the Ref. 6105 “Captain Willard” (thanks to its being famously worn by Martin Sheen’s character in Apocalypse Now.) The “Turtle” nickname first surfaced in 1976, applied to the References 6306 and 6309 — the former, made for the Japanese market, and the latter, for international customers. These watches were notable for their cushion-shaped cases with softly rounded lugs, which brought to mind the silhouette of a turtle when viewed from above. The Turtle gained a modicum of pop-culture visibility when actor Ed Harris wore it in the 1989 underwater-adventure film The Abyss, and also when it was spotted on the wrists of legendary rockers Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones and Brian May of Queen. 

Among the highlights of the original Turtle references — which were made for a relatively short period, from 1976 to 1988 — were the steel case, measuring 44mm wide and 12.6mm thick, with a Hardlex mineral crystal over the dial; a matte black dial with big, luminous hour markers and hands; a lollipop-tipped seconds hand; a bidirectional rotating bezel with easy-grip fluting on the edge; and an in-house automatic movement — the 21-jewel Caliber 6306A in the Ref. 6306 and the 17-jewel Caliber 6309A in the 6309. As JDM models originally (i.e., intended solely for the Japanese Domestic Market), the Ref. 6306 Turtles included the so-called Kanji day-date wheel, which paired a Japanese character for the day of the week with an Arabic date numeral. The watch, whose turtle-leg lugs extended its lug-to-lug measurement to 48mm, was water-resistant to 150 meters, aided by a screw-down crown placed unconventionally at 4 o’clock — an element first seen on the Captain Willard model. 

After a long absence during a Seiko dive-watch era dominated mostly by the influential and fondly remembered SKX007 series, Seiko welcomed the Turtle back to its lineup in 2016, making only slight design concessions (and a few technical upgrades) for the modern era. The first model, Ref. SRP777, introduced the Prospex logo on the dial; a slightly different seconds hand with a “lollipop” as counterweight instead of tip; hands and indexes filled with LumiBrite, Seiko’s proprietary luminescent material; slightly longer lugs; and the crown moved slightly up from 4 o’clock to accommodate the architecture of the new movement, automatic Caliber 4R36. The water resistance, going forward, would now be a more robust 200 meters rather than the 150 meters of the 1970s models. 

Right on this homage model’s heels in 2017 came the Ref. SRPC35K1 “Mini Turtle,” which took the chunky 45mm case down to a more manageable 42mm (43mm lug to lug, 12.6mm thick) and added a magnifying lens over the date. And in 2019, Seiko introduced the model we’re spotlighting here, the military-green-dialed Ref. SRPE05, whose stately dimensions and more luxurious execution earned it the regal nickname, “King Turtle.” The now-familiar, curvilinear cushion case measures 45mm wide and 47.7mm lug to lug, with a thickness of 13.2mm — just a smidgen bigger than the SRP777 Turtle, whose case comes in at 44.3mm wide but whose thickness and lug-to-lug measurement are comparable to the King Turtle’s. 

More significant are the elements added to the SRPE05 (and its sibling, the black-dialed SRPE03) that take it up a notch in terms of luxury: the Hardlex crystal of its predecessor gives way here to one made of scratch-resistant sapphire. The rotating dive-scale bezel — which, on the Prospex models, rotates in one direction rather than two, a necessary adjustment for the model to qualify as a dive watch under international ISO standards — features an insert made of ceramic, a material offering a higher degree of hardness, and a sleeker look, than the aluminum inserts on the Turtle models. The dial of the King Turtle is distinguished by a waffled, textural motif that adds visual depth and imparts more of a 3D character than the matte dial of its predecessor. Finally, a magnifying lens, carried over from the discontinued Mini Turtles, has been incorporated into the crystal directly over the day-and-date window at 3 o’clock. 

The case has an array of brushed and polished surfaces, and resists water pressure to 200 meters, as indicated on the dial directly beneath the Prospex logo that identifies the King Turtle as a member of that sprawling product family. (Another somewhat subtle distinction: the seconds hand is in yellow to echo the color of the dial’s “Diver’s 200M” inscription.) The crown screws securely into a well-guarded nook near 4 o’clock, and the solid caseback bears an on-theme relief engraving of the “Great Wave of Kanagawa” depicted in a famous Edo-period woodblock print by Japanese artist Hokusai. Beating behind that caseback is Seiko’s in-house automatic Caliber 4R36, possessing 24 jewels, a 21,600-vph frequency, and a 41-hour power reserve, backed up by the Japanese brand’s DiaShock anti-shock device and bidirectional Magic Lever winding system. 

Perhaps the most appealing aspect of these majestic divers is that it won’t cost you a king’s ransom to procure one. The Seiko Prospex “King Turtle” models — SRPE03 in the black dial and SRPE05 in the dark green dial — are mounted on either a steel three-link bracelet, with an MSRP of $625, or on a sporty, dial-matching silicone strap, for $595. Bet you thought you'd have to "shell" out a lot more. (Ouch.)