Description
Chronoswiss has taken the Neo Digiteur — a handless, rectangular jumping-hour watch that is one of the odder things in modern Swiss watchmaking — and dressed it in pastel. The Neo Digiteur Pastel Code is a trio of steel watches in Rose, Mint and Sky, each limited to 99 pieces, at CHF 11,500 / EUR 12,700 / US$13,900 / GBP 12,200.
Nothing mechanical has changed. The hours still jump in an aperture at twelve, the minutes still drag across a central arch, and the seconds still sweep through a panoramic window at six — a regulator, in other words, rendered digitally. What has changed is the colour, and on a watch this assertive the softening is more radical than it sounds.
Design
The case measures 48 mm long, 30 mm wide and 9.7 mm thick in stainless steel, barrel-shaped and rectangular, with horizontally brushed surfaces, polished bevels and recessed sandblasted flanks along the sides. The crown keeps the Chronoswiss onion signature but is flattened on its underside to sit better against the case, and the lugs are screwed in. The crystal is sapphire with double anti-reflective coating; the caseback is brushed steel with a tonneau-shaped sapphire window, screwed down.
The dial — really a cover plate — is sandblasted and then lacquered, which gives the pastel a matte surface with some depth rather than a flat wash. Rose is a light pink, Mint a pale green, Sky a soft blue. The discs beneath are matte white printed in deep blue, and each watch carries its individual edition number in the xx/99 format. Straps are textile in grey or black on a steel pin buckle.
Specifications
- References: CH-1373.2-LR (Rose), CH-1373.2-LG (Mint), CH-1373.2-LB (Sky)
- Case dimensions: 48 mm (length) x 30 mm (width) x 9.7 mm (thickness)
- Case material: stainless steel, brushed with polished edges and recessed sandblasted flanks
- Crystal: sapphire with double anti-reflective coating
- Caseback: brushed steel with tonneau-shaped sapphire window, screwed
- Water resistance: 50 m
- Dial: pastel lacquer on sandblasted base; matte white discs with deep blue printing
- Movement: Chronoswiss C.85757, manual winding
- Base / module: Peseux 7001 architecture with proprietary Chronoswiss jumping-hour module
- Jewels: 19
- Frequency: 21,600 vph (3 Hz)
- Power reserve: approximately 48 hours
- Complications: jumping hours, dragging digital minutes, sweeping seconds
- Regulating organ: Glucydur balance, Nivarox hairspring, Incabloc shock protection
- Finishing: rhodium plating with radial Cotes de Geneve
- Strap: textile in grey or black with steel pin buckle
- Limited edition: 99 pieces per colour
- Price: CHF 11,500 / EUR 12,700 / US$13,900 / GBP 12,200
- Availability: via chronoswiss.com
What's Exciting
The interesting engineering here is the energy budget. A jumping hour has to store power and release it instantaneously once an hour, and doing that alongside a continuously dragging minute display and a running seconds hand means one mainspring is feeding three quite different demands. Chronoswiss's module manages that on a Peseux 7001 base — a thin, well-understood hand-wound calibre — and still returns 48 hours. That is a sensible piece of design rather than a showy one.
The pastel decision is the part worth arguing about. Chronoswiss is a brand built on assertive, slightly confrontational design, and a montre a guichet with no hands is already an exotic object; painting it Rose or Mint reads at first as a softening that undercuts the concept. In practice it does the opposite. The matte lacquer over sandblasting keeps the surface from looking sugary, and the contrast between a gentle colour and a starkly technical display is a sharper idea than another black or grey edition would have been. Note one downgrade against the first Neo Digiteurs, though: these drop the hand-guilloche movement decoration for Cotes de Geneve, which is a cleaner look but less handwork for the money.
History
Gerd-Rudiger Lang founded Chronoswiss in 1983, and the brand's first digital time display arrived in 2005 as the Digiteur MSA — Montre Sans Aiguilles, the watch without hands — a modern reading of the jump-hour watches of the 1920s and 1930s. That original ran a tonneau-shaped calibre 130 from Fabrique d'Ebauches de Fleurier, the movement-blank house founded in Fleurier in 1882, and it was made only in precious metals.
The now Lucerne-based brand revived the concept in 2025 as the Neo Digiteur, in steel, with sharper case geometry and an updated movement. The calibre designation C.85757 is a private joke made public: it refers to the original Chronoswiss postal code from 1983. The tonneau shape of the sapphire caseback window is a nod to the Fleurier movements of the 2005 original.
