Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Compressor GMT Watches

There’s watchmaking and there’s watchmaking, and this Master Grande Tradition from Jaeger-LeCoultre is the latter. We’ve spoken before about the minute repeater and its incredible, unbelievable capabilities—now we’re going to explore it like it’s never been seen before.

The dress watch is perhaps the hardest watch to master. It has to be simple, it has to be manual wind, it has to have no complications—small seconds at a push—and it has to be small, both in diameter, but more importantly, thickness. This leaves very little for a watchmaker to hide behind, only the quality of the watchmaking itself left to do the talking. How do the very best brands in the world do it?

Since the whopping $17.8 million sale of Paul Newman’s Paul Newman, the world’s—or what seems like it—attention has been turned to vintage chronographs. Thing is, vintage chronographs can be pretty expensive. There are some great options out there if you’re willing to do a lot—a lot—of research, but even those can be costly. A Longines 13ZN can fetch as much as £15,000 for example. If all that sounds too much like hard work, then perhaps we have the answer for you…

For many of us, we can only dream of owning a Jaeger-LeCoultre, IWC or Rolex, and that’s a shame. But there’s another way, sort of—buy a more affordable alternative. With that said, here are three more affordable alternatives to expensive watches.