News · Timex
Timex revives the 1983 E Line as a 38mm automatic with a see-through back
The 1983 TV Dial comes back at 38mm with a Miyota 8215 behind a display caseback, from US$379.
Hen & Mills Editorial · 2 min read · 15 August 2026
Timex has put a display caseback on a US$379 watch. Behind it a Miyota 8215 winds itself off your wrist, which is not what the E Line was up to in 1983. Back then it was a quartz dress watch with a rounded-square case, the one Timex has always called the TV Dial. The Automatic E Line brings that shape back at 38mm and makes it mechanical.
I expected to shrug at this and I didn't. There is one spec I would change, and the rest of it lands.
The TV Dial has found its moment
The rounded square is the whole draw. It went out of fashion, sat there for decades, and has been hauled back in by every integrated-bracelet sports watch of the last few years. The difference here is that Timex isn't borrowing the idea off anyone. It is their own case, out of their own catalogue.
The 38mm case rides a brushed steel bracelet with a butterfly clasp. The dial carries a fine horizontal texture and a date window at three. The version shown here mixes steel and gold, which is the loudest of the three finishes and the one that commits hardest to the year it came from.
Twenty-one jewels, on show
The 8215 is the Japanese automatic sitting behind a good half of the affordable mechanical watches you have ever handled. Twenty-one jewels, self-winding, keeps decent time for the money. It is also basic. You can't wind it by hand, and the seconds hand moves with a faint shuffle that tells you exactly what it is.
None of that bothers me through a window. I have spent more time than I'd care to admit watching an 8215 turn over, and a display back on a watch this cheap is doing precisely the job it was put there to do.
Mineral glass, on a watch built to be looked at
The crystal is flat mineral glass. Not sapphire. Mineral picks up scratches where sapphire shrugs them off, and on a watch whose whole pitch is admiring it, that is the spec that stings. At close to four hundred dollars in 2026 plenty of buyers will clock it.
The budget clearly went into the movement and the display back, and something had to give. Keep it off your keys and it will be fine. It is still the first thing I'd change.
US$379, and nothing listed here yet
The plainer steel dials are US$379, the two-tone is US$399, and all of them get 50 metres of water resistance. That covers rain and a splash and stops well short of swimming.
For a mechanical watch with a shape worth reissuing, a movement you can watch working and a bracelet that suits it, this is the most tempting thing Timex has done in a while. Timex hasn't listed an Australian price on its own store, so buying one here means a grey import or a wait.
