Bird's-Eye View

The dial of the Chopard Alpine Eagle XL Chrono was inspired by the iris of an eagle’s eye. Even though we cannot view this fascinating steel chronograph with the extraordinarily sharp eyesight of that bird of prey, we nonetheless scrutinized it with an eagle eye during our test.

- Martina Richter

Scientists believe that eagles can spot animals the size of rabbits more than half a mile away and are able to see small organisms, like insects, from a distance of more than 50 feet. A person would need to look through binoculars with at least seven times magnification to see that well.

We used a watchmaker’s loupe with 5.5-times magnification to give us a proverbial “eagle eye” view when we scrutinized the impressive face of the Alpine Eagle XL Chrono, our test watch. The dial’s ray-like or feathery structure, which emanates from the center and curves slightly as the rays approach the rim, is quite difficult to describe. What would we see if we could view it through an eagle’s eyes? Irregular stripes, broken lines with heights and depths, an iridescent blue that changes from very pale to bluish gray to nearly black depending on the incident light, a finely printed tachymeter scale along the flange, and a minute scale, which doubles as the scale for the chronograph’s elapsed seconds, concentrically below the flange.

The shorter end of the central elapsed-seconds hand is shaped like a feather; its longer end has a slim red tip that sweeps along the elapsed-seconds scale, which is calibrated in single-second increments. This hand is long enough to reach the finely drawn arc of the tachymeter scale, which has unobtrusive red accents at the 100, 160 and 240 marks. These accentuate the gradations for 5, 10, 20 and 40 kilometers per hour and make it easier to read average speeds.

A Detailed Dial That’s Easy to Read