Oris celebrates the summer with a colorful addition to its successful bronze-cased Diver’s Sixty-Five ‘Cotton Candy’ series, which debuted last year. With their pastel blue, green and pink dials, the 38mm confections were a tasty confection amid a challenging year.
One of the three Oris Diver’s Sixty-Five ‘Cotton Candy’ models, showing new matching Perlon strap.
This month, the independent watchmaker extends the Cotton Candy collection with matching recycled Perlon straps for each model. The textile is woven and attached to the wrist with a bronze buckle.
The new series maintains the same set of technical specifications as the earlier series, which debuted with either a bronze bracelet or a light brown leather strap.
Oris fits each watch with a Sellita-based Oris 733 automatic movement, protected by a nicely domed sapphire crystal and a case water-resistant to 100 meters. All hands and applied indices are filled with bright SuperLuminova. Price: $2,600.
Specifications: Oris Diver’s Sixty Five Cotton Candy
Case: 38mm multi-piece bronze, uni-directional rotating bezel with bronze inlay and minute scale in relief. Sapphire crystal is domed on both sides, anti-reflective coating inside. Screwed caseback is specially engraved. Bronze screw-in security crown, water resistance to 100 meters.
Movement: Automatic Oris 733 (Sellita-based), hours, minutes and seconds, date window, instantaneous date, date corrector, fine-timing device and stop-second. Frequency of28,800 vph with 38-hour power reserve.
Dial: Sky blue, wild green or lipstick pink, applied indices and hands with Super-Luminova.
Bracelet: Recycled Perlon strap colored to match dial, bronze buckle.
Norqain adds a blue dial limited edition model to its 40mm Freedom 60 GMT collection, one of the independent Swiss watchmaker’s most popular designs.
The Norqain Freedom 60 GMT 40mm Limited Edition
With its 1960s-style domed dial and an easy-to-read GMT scale in the center of the dial, the watch has serious vintage appeal. Norqain seals the appeal when it applies Old Radium SuperLuminova to the bronze hands, and frames it all with a bronze case.
Norqain underscores all this retro eye-candy with appropriately modern technology, most critically the use of its chronometer-precise, in-house-designed Caliber NN20/2, an automatic movement (below) produced together with movement-maker Kenissi.
The movement boasts a jumping hour to easily set the time and date forward or backward. Its long power reserve of seventy hours is among the most impressive we’ve seen at this price point.
Also very up-to-date is Norqain’s decision to offer only non-leather straps or metal bracelets for all its watches. For this new model Norqain offers three different bracelet options, including a vegan-certified Perlon blue rubber strap with a pin clasp that matches the case. The watch is also available with Norqain’s own Nortide strap and an Alcantara strap, both of which include stitches that resemble mountaintops near the lugs.
For U.S. collectors, Hublot offers its 45mm Classic Fusion three-hand date model with a new brown dial and limited edition bronze-cased dress.
The Hublot Classic Fusion 45mm Bronze Brown
The handsome dress model, one of the watchmaker’s most unadorned watches, is simplicity at its core, with a classical time and date display framed by a hand-brushed bronze case and matching bezel.
Strapped to a chocolate brown alligator strap and powered by Hublot’s own Caliber HUB1112 automatic movement, the Classic Fusion 45mm Bronze Brown is available only through Hublot.com to customers in the United States of America. Hublot will make thirty watches with this unusual combination of materials and colors.
Hublot explains that the limited edition launch is meant as “a celebration of the intrepid lifestyles (that were unexpectedly put on hold for so long) and a demonstration of Hublot.com keeping pace with their clients and their adventures and pursuits.”
Specifications: Hublot Classic Fusion 45mm Bronze Brown
(Ref. 511.BZ.3480.LR.ECU21, Limited edition of 30)
Dial: Sunray brown, polished 3N gold-plated applique dial and markers.
Case: 45mm by 10.95mm brushed bronze, sapphire crystal with anti-reflective treatment, brushed bronze with black composite resin bezel, polished 3N gold screws. Water resistance to 50 meters. Micro-blasted black ceramic engraved back with “SPECIAL EDITION” “XX/30” and sapphire.
Movement: Caliber Hublot HUB1112 self-winding, date aperture, 4 Hz (28,800 A/h) frequency, power reserve is 42 hours. Hublot-designed tungsten openwork rotor is black-plated.
Strap: Brown alligator with brown stitching on black rubber, black blushed bronze and black- plated stainless steel deployant buckle clasp.
Anyone who knows Oris knows the flagship Big Crown Pointer Date, with its oversized crown and prominent crescent-tipped central date indicator. It’s been in continuous production since 1938, first created by the Holstein-based brand for glove-wearing aviators who appreciated its user-friendly attributes.
The Big Crown has had a variety of incarnations over the years, in varying sizes and materials. Notably, in 2018 on the 80th anniversary of its debut it was introduced in a 40mm commemorative edition with a bronze case and fitted on a leather strap.
The Oris Big Crown Bronze Pointer Date Collection.
Bronze is once again the metal of choice for the newest Big Crown, this time—and for the first time—with a bronze bracelet and clasp, in addition to its case, fluted bezel and security crown.
The 40mm Big Crown Pointer Date Bronze collection includes four dial colors, visible beneath the watch’s domed sapphire glass—green, brown, Bordeaux and blue—and each lends a distinctly vintage-y vibe to the watch’s already-retro look. The printed Arabic numerals and indices feature SuperLumiNova, and the pointer date offers a familiar pop of red.
Inside beats the automatic Oris Caliber 754 (based on the Sellita SW200-1), as seen in earlier Big Crown iterations. It, and its signature red-lacquer rotor, may be seen through the transparent screw-in caseback. Its functions include hours, minutes, seconds and date.
The seven-link brushed bracelet has a folding clasp, while the sustainably sourced brown leather strap option has a pin buckle.
I like both options, but if you’re going for the bronze, I say go big.
Oris maintains its reputation for producing affordable, well-made watches. The Big Crown Pointer Date Bronze on a bracelet is priced at $2,600, while the leather-strap version is $2,100.
There is a crucial moment that every watch collector faces in those fast seconds before a multi-day excursion: picking the watches to wear. My personal go-to for changing time zones includes a GMT for tracking home time and a rugged dive watch for everyday wear. Fate, in the form of a press release from Rado, showed up two days before I was scheduled to leave for Tamarindo, Costa Rica, with an offer to review the new Captain Cook dive watch.
I told their very responsive rep if he could get me the watch before I left, it would become my travelling companion on the trip for a hard-core review. Literally hours before departure I was unboxing their bronze beauty and tossing it in the carry-on bag. Welcome to the manifest, Captain.
The Rado with my usual traveling companions.
The Blancpain Fifty Fathoms and its counterpart the Rolex Submariner have collectively set the standards by which all other dive watches should be measured. Like the Eames chair, they sport all the elements, on functional and aesthetic levels, that serve to define the breed. Virtually every other dive watch developed in the past seventy years has drawn from the feature sets of these two watches.
Rado side-by-side with the Blancpain Fifty Fathoms.
Rado’s reissue of its original 1960’s Captain Cook diver teases elements of these classics, with updates that tastefully reflect popular contemporary treatments and materials.
Let’s get into it…
The Rado delivers a rich wrist statement, utilizing the green and gold of the old Marshall Field’s logo (not John Deere, thank you), and is a striking take on the traditional dive treatment.
The Captain’s green dial is surrounded by a matching ceramic bezel and lives in a bronze case with a titanium back. While I would have preferred a matching color scheme on the bezel indices, the silver is subtle enough to work with the theme.
Its dial is called “green sunray” in the press materials and is slightly domed, giving the high gloss face a three-dimensional glean reminiscent of a highly polished fender on a British racing green Jaguar XK-120. Par for the vintage theme, the hands and markers are a cream-colored Super LumiNova.
The dial also sports a swiveling gold anchor at 12 o’clock, a neat, very, very subtle touch that gives users and excuse to twirl the watch around and wonder “why is my anchor spinning? What does it mean?” Tres 60’s!
The Movement
The Captain is waterproof to 1,000 feet and powered by an automatic ETA C07, 25-jewel, three- hand movement with a date at 3 o’clock and up to eighty hours power reserve. This is the ‘Powermatic 80’ movement with silicon balance spring, found in many models of Tissot, Certina and Mido watches.
The movement is a no-nonsense performer, offering an impressive power reserve and anti-magnetic properties through the use of a silicon escapement. For those interested in a deep dive into this movement, check out this article in Monochrome and complete technical specifications, including use in other watches, here on Watchbase.
The Bronze Case
The payoff for owners of the Good Captain is found in the bronze case, with a material that has been showing up in increased usage over the years. Unlike stainless steel or gold, that simply scratch and get dirty, bronze develops a unique patina as it’s worn.
The result of the oxidation of the copper component of the bronze can appear as brown, black, red, blue or green. Costa Rica provided the perfect environment to see if the Captain could live up to its name as a sea going adventurer and emerge as a newly colored denizen of the not so deep seas.
Wearing experience
The Captain looks and feels solid. The bezel has a nice loud ratchet sound that indicates things are properly aligned. It’s a medium-weight timepiece with a nicely unobtrusive 12.5mm x 42mm case.
While I prefer a horned watch crown and more aggressive ridges on the bezel, the coin-edged style has a more subdued look and feel than, say, the Rado Hyperchrome Captain Cook 2017, with its Fifty Fathoms-esque treatment.
The watch is incredibly easy to read and maintains a night’s worth of luminescence. I’m a personal fan the Captain’s titanium case back because of weight savings and hypoallergenic properties.
The sample I received had a single-piece leather band, and would be better served with a lined Horween, but that’s strictly a personal preference. If anyone was actually going to use this as a dive watch (probably one tenth of one percent of the buyers), the strap and shallow ridges of the bezel would prove a problem underwater. However, for the moisture-averse who will more than likely purchase this product, that won’t be an issue.
Getting it wet Rado in the pool.
Given the Rado’s pedigree as a dive watch, ala the original 60s iteration, I intended to get the Captain wet and dirty, covered with sunscreen and oil, and then hang it out in the sun to dry. To this end the watch accompanied me in the surf, by the pool, up and down daily ten-mile walks through dusty hills and was worn while sweating and spilling margaritas and tequila shots.
Any dive watch that remains neat and clean and dry should be forcibly taken from its owner and that misguided individual barred from ever owning another watch with a water-resistant rating over one meter. But I digress.
The watch swum through the week of abuse with no undue scratching, scarring or unwanted mutating. The bronze case picked up a dull finish with some blackish highlights, answering the question of how it would tarnish. While the user’s manual states that the watch can be returned to Rado for cleaning (really), I found using metal polish worked just fine – see the before and after photos with minimal elbow grease.
Rado case before polishing.And after polishing.
Would I buy this watch?
Absolutely – and for many several reasons. It’s great looking, in a non-blingy way, and punches well above its class for the price. Unlike stainless or gold watches, it feels organic.
The bronze changes and reflects the activity level of the user. It features a whopping four anchor logos between the case and strap, and three starfish on the case back (It would have been nice to see a mermaid as well), but who knows what the future may hold! It has a domed crystal and a groovy domed dial – a double dose of domage – awesome! And, finally, it holds its value: check out the used prices on eBay against the street price on this watch (as a comparison look at Romain Jerome as well – a cringe-worthy value dropper!).
As a daily wear in dry conditions, the watch as configured with a leather strap will serve most users well. For those who actually wear dive watches for diving I’d suggest investing in a metal bracelet model. The Captain was a great travelling companion, and kudos to Rado for delivering exceptional quality at a realistic price point. Price: $2,600
The dial also sports a swiveling gold anchor at 12 o’clock, a neat, very, very subtle touch that gives users and excuse to twirl the watch around and wonder “why is my anchor spinning? What does it mean?” Tres 60’s!
While I prefer a horned watch crown and more aggressive ridges on the bezel, the coin-edged style has a more subdued look and feel than, say, the 
