Freestyle Spy watch

[rickyd]

I just purchased a Freestyle Spy. It's rated to 100m, and has a backlight feature, was fairly inexpensive, nice big arms and numbers.

But, I just read in the instructions ( yes, I RTFM ): " WARNING: Do not press the Night Vision button while underwater. Although it is water-resistant in its normal position, it will leak when pressed under water, and void your warranty. " Is this a crock, or what? Anyone know if it does actually leak if pressed?

I've seen a few folks here have the Freestyle Hamerhead. I wonder if that model has the same "restriction"?

 

[DarkFrog]

I just purchased a Freestyle Spy. It's rated to 100m, and has a backlight feature, was fairly inexpensive, nice big arms and numbers.

But, I just read in the instructions ( yes, I RTFM ): " WARNING: Do not press the Night Vision button while underwater. Although it is water-resistant in its normal position, it will leak when pressed under water, and void your warranty. " Is this a crock, or what? Anyone know if it does actually leak if pressed?

I've seen a few folks here have the Freestyle Hamerhead. I wonder if that model has the same "restriction"?

I believe you'll find that most watches have this restriction. They are rated for "static pressure" which means when the watches are tested, they are brought down to the test pressure nice and slowly and then brought up nice and slowly. Pressing the buttons causes dynamic pressure, which the watches are not tested for and which the watch companies don't want to take responsability for.

Generally, its recommended that, to make up for this fact, dive watches be rated to 200m. That being said, Sheck Exley used $10 casio watches rated to 50m(I think) for most of his dives and some companies with good reputations in the dive world have watches rated to 100 or 50m, but you don't hear people complaining all the time about 100m watches flooding(although you do hear it occasionally).

 

[rickyd]

I got to thinking it must have to do with testing and liability also. My previous watch was a 25$ Armitron analog, rated to 50m. It flooded at 40m.