Usually, dive watches do not perform very well when it comes to the awards that honor the watch industry. They rarely compete on a level playing field with their much more complicated counterparts, and we probably can also agree that as a category, dive watches tend to be a bit more restricted when it comes to design and elegance.
Nevertheless, dive watches do occasionally surface in these awards presentations (participation is everything, after all), and even the international Watchstars jury has finally started to nominate these watches featuring a rotating bezel (11 nominees this year compared to zero last year) as well. Final results can be expected in March 2016.
The results from the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève can be expected a bit earlier: At the end of October 2015 we should definitely know if one of the three pre-selected dive watches made it to the next level. That is a very big “if,” even though we were positively surprised to see Seiko’s new Hi-Beat Marinemaster counted deservedly among the selections.
Maybe that’s why Watchtime’s German sister publication Chronos chose a different approach: the public search for the most popular dive watch in different price categories recently revealed the following winners:
What might be most interesting about the results is this: Tudor’s recently upgraded Pelagos seems to be the one dive watch everyone agrees on as being worthy of an award. The blue-dialed version of this watch was named as a nominee for all three of the above-mentioned awards. And we at DiveIntoWatches.com couldn’t agree more: after reviewing the first generation (still featuring an ETA 2824-2 rather than an in-house Tudor movement) a while back, we came to the same conclusion – the Tudor Pelagos is indeed a very impressive contemporary dive watch.
Just bought one of these last week, amazing timepiece! Love it!
Congrats, amazing watch!
Can’t decide Tudor Pelagos, or Rolex explorer 1. 60th birthday present to myself!