The Cartier Santos is one of Cartier’s most famous watch lines, given its history as the first men’s wristwatch. The Santos 100 series itself is discontinued now but are readily available on the used market.

Width: 38mm (without crown), 42.7 mm (with crown)

Lug-to-lug: 51mm

Thickness: 10.5mm

Lug width: 23mm

It offers 100 meters of water resistance.

This reference features a matte silver dial. The hours are marked in the traditional Cartier Roman numeral format, in black laquor, with the minute track on the interior section of the dial also done in black so there is a high degree of contrast between the dial and the markings. The hour and minute hands are sword style, black and containing lume, and the central seconds hand is also in black. Additional dial text is minimal. The name Cartier appears beneath the 12 o’clock position, and Automatic above the 6 o’clock position. The base of the 6 o’clock marker is flanked by the words Swiss Made and one leg of the V in the 7 o’clock marker is actually the word Cartier.

The watch hands do feature lume.

The watch case itself is stainless steel and the dial is protected by sapphire and features a screw-down bezel. Most of the watch surface is brushed though the bezel is polished. The watch does feature crownguards and the crown itself features an inset cabochon. The entire case curves to help hug the wrist and is far more effective at controlling the size of this watch versus just curving the lugs, but that will be more obvious in the wrist shot.

The watch comes on an alligator strap with a deployant clasp. The clasp mechanism seems quite sturdy though this is my first deployant so I don’t have other versions to compare it to.

Back to the crown, this is not a screw down and features two positions. In position zero the watch can be handwound. In position one the watch time can be set.

Flipping the watch over you can see another the watch has a closed caseback. The watch is powered by the Cartier Caliber 049. This movement is based on the ETA 2892-A2, and it is an automatic movement that beats at 4Hz, has 21 jewels, and offers approximately 42 hours of power reserve.

Putting this watch on my timegrapher, I get an average across all six positions of a -7.8 seconds per day. The range of readings was -14 seconds per day to -3 seconds per day.

My overall thoughts:

The positives:

• Well laid out, easy to read dial

• Nice curved case

The negatives:

• Not great accuracy for the price

• Bezel will be a scratch magnet

As the Santos 100 is not currently produced, pricing is subject to what they are trading for second-hand. Depending on year, condition, and the other typical variables I’d say these tend to currently trade between $4,000 and $6,000 with Chrono24 currently tagging an average price for a very good condition model at about $5,300.

This is a big watch for a square watch. The curved case really helps with that. It is one of the most comfortable watches I’ve worn because the weight is so nicely distributed across my wrist. That this watch came on an alligator strap suggests it wants to be a dress watch, but obviously the size makes it more of a statement piece. There are much smaller Santos watches available for those who worry this may be too large.

The Cartier Santos, be it this model or others, are known to get a lot of scratches in the polished bezel which often stands out against the brushed case. I imagine it looks better as those even out. I’m someone who tends to put scratches on my watches given how I wear them, but if you are someone who is bothered by scratches I’d steer clear of these polished bezels entirely.

I am disappointed in the watch’s accuracy given the price point. Its average is good enough that I won’t bother regulating it further but for watches at this price point I always ding them if they aren’t meeting the COSC standard. It didn’t advertise at that level of accuracy, but it’s a personal judgment I have at the price-point.

Those are the main items of note. Even though the watch dial is large I think Cartier did a great job keeping the dial both classic and easy-to-read. The strap hardware is pretty cool too, and the way it feeds it looks to be extremely easy to reuse and just replace the leather should you wear out the strap.

Overall, I’d say if you like larger watches but want something that can be formal or more casual and enjoy the square design then the Cartier Santos 100 is definitely worth looking into. I imagine with something like a silicone strap option you could really dress this watch down, even with is Roman numeral dial (which I tend to find more formal than other formats).