Which is the blackest black possible? One that captures all the light reaching it, so that nothing is reflected and nothing reaches the eye of the observer. It must be something of a contemporary obsession at the moment, because not one, but two brands present at watch fair SIHH in Geneva, January 2017, presented watches…
Most watch brands make products that are fundamentally similar to all the mechanical watches that have been made for the last two centuries. A few do something different, and create a product that represents a radical departure and that hallmarks all the brand’s products. Examples are HYT with their watches in which liquid is used…
The Bradley is a quartz watch originally designed for blind people, but that is winning success with normal-sighted people as well for its unusual looks. It has a tactile front face with a ball bearing in a central groove indicating minutes. Another ball bearing rotating around a groove on the side of the case indicates…
The Oris Altimeter Rega Limited Edition is one of the very few pilot’s watches to have a specialist pilot’s function. Breva also make a watch with an altimeter, the Génie 02, but it has a slightly higher price tag: $132,000, against which the Oris watch compares very favourably at 3,950 Swiss francs. The Oris Altimeter…
The Rotonde de Cartier Astromystérieux is a contemporary mystery watch, in which not just the hands, but the entire movement is suspended on a series of transparent sapphire discs. It’s an extraordinary concept, difficult to express using just still images. Cartier’s video gives an idea of what it’s about, in their habitually understated style: In the…
Ressence, founded in 2010 by Benoît Mintiens in Antwerp, Belgium, has achieved a lot over the last six years. In November 2013, the Type 3 was awarded the Horological revelation prize at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève (GPHG). This year, 2016, Ressence have once again entered a watch into the competition, Type 5B, this…
The two new Divas’ Dream watches by Bulgari combine very feminine lines and gemsetting, with a mechanical movement and an interesting complication. Minutes are shown by a retrograde hand which flicks back to zero once it has completed its one-hour arc. Hours are shown by a number in a window at the base of the…
A few brands work on completely new depictions of time, and Manufacture Contemporaine du Temps are a member of this exclusive club. They make around 100 watches per year and so they’re all pretty special. The Sequential Two was presented at Baselworld in 2014, and this year, it has been introduced in two new limited…
The Freak by Ulysse Nardin is a bit like Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, in that there is so much to understand that you can only stand in awe at what it achieves. In the case of the Freak, the genius was Ludwig Oechslin who designed the first Freak, presented at Baselworld in 2001. The concept…
Without doubt one of the 2016 watchmaking highlights, the Grand Deck Marine Tourbillon by Ulysse Nardin is like having a J-class yacht on your wrist. With teak decking and a boom indicating the minutes, pulled by tiny cables running through pulleys, like the ropes on a sailing boat, the watch is an unusual concept, beautifully…
The Royal Retro movement used in watches by Pierre DeRoche gives the dial extra animated interest, with each second hand moving through a ten-second period before flicking back to zero and leaving the next to ship our fragile craft through the sea of time. In this piece, this delicate show is joined by a skull…
This year, Romain Gauthier has given his Logical One a new series of cool looks. The watch remains the same, with its constant-force escapement based on a chain with ruby links, an eccentric pair of dials for hours, minutes and seconds, a balance in full view, and a pusher for winding. But its aesthetics have…
Logical One BTG is a variant by Romain Gauthier of his Logical One. It is a five-piece limited edition, with black titanium ADLC (Amorphous Diamond-Like Carbon)-treated case and anthracite ADLC mainplate, and subdials for time indications in blue enamel. The pusher at 9 o’clock, used to wind the watch, and the crown, are in white…
Logical One by Romain Gauthier was an exceptional watch when it appeared in 2013, and it won a prize for Best Men’s Complication watch at the “watch Oscars,” Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève. Not surprisingly, Romain Gauthier is making new versions using different materials that provide an interesting visual appearance. Logical One with a bit…
Perrelet’s hallmark is the dial-side rotor, connected to the oscillating weight on the movement side. It highlights part of the movement that is generally left on the sidelines, the rotor that powers the automatic winding system. This is not surprising, because Abraham-Louis Perrelet completed his first self-winding movement in 1777. The First Class Double Rotor…
MB&F developed their HMX watch for 2015, their tenth anniversary. It has an innovative system of displaying the time, with rotating discs on top of the movement whose image is reflected through 90° so that it can be seen on the front of the watch where it is magnified by crystal prisms. The result is…
After his watches Variocurve and Quickindicator, Daniel Nebel, founder, owner, watch designer and builder at Nord Zeitmaschine, has launched a new timepiece: Freesdial. The name is a brilliant play on words, and the timepiece is unlike anything seen before. As the large minute hand moves around the dial over the course of an hour, parts…
Would you want to meet this thing on a dark night, or in a tropical jungle? It’s name is menacing enough, T-Rex, and that spiky carapace looks threatening to say the least. The top of the case is in hand-finished bronze, and the crown at the top is also magnificently aggressive. Even when new, the…
IWC’s new Pilot’s Watch Timezoner Chronograph has an interesting complication: a world time function based on a sprung rotating bezel that you have to depress to turn, and which shows the time and date in another time zone, along with the 24-hour hand that functions as a day/night indicator. It has a busy dial, but…
The Piaget Emperador Coussin XL 700P brings quartz into a mechanical watch. Will purists like it? Who knows. But it is a bold, perhaps even revolutionary move, and Piaget are able to describe it as “the most precise mechanical watch in Switzerland.” Piaget has long made its own quartz movements – the name of this…