THE WORLD OF FINE WATCHES
SPOTLIGHT www.watchtime.com
THE REBIRTH OF THE BRAND AND A TEST OF THE ORIS AQUIS DEPTH GAUGE FROM THE PAGES OF WATCHTIME MAGAZINE
ORIS
MECHANICAL At the nadir of the quartz crisis, Ulrich Herzog became CEO of moribund Oris and began steering it to an all-mechanical future. Here’s his tale. By Norma BuchaNaN
lrich Herzog, executive chairman of Oris, remembers the day more than 30 years ago, in the thick of the quartz crisis, when Ernst Thomke dropped by to see the Oris factory. Herzog was the company’s marketing manager. Thomke, who, as general manager at Ebauches SA, then the parent company of ETA, was one of the most powerful men in the Swiss watch industry, was looking for a place to manufacture ETA’s new Swatch Watch. Oris and ETA were both part of the Swiss watch holding company ASUAG. Why not shut Oris down, or sell it off, and use the factory for Swatch, Thomke thought. After all, Oris, like many other Swiss watch brands at the time, made no money. The brand was, literally, a waste of space. As it happened, there was not enough open space to accommodate Swatch’s automated production lines. Oris stayed on in the building it had occupied for some 75 years, surviving the quartz crisis, if just barely, and all that followed. Now
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an all-mechanical brand, making moderately priced watches, it’s headquartered in the same building, in the town of Hölstein, a few miles southeast of Basel. Herzog, now 70, is still there, too: he’s been in charge of the company’s day-today operations since 1982 and is its largest shareholder. WatchTime visited him to hear about his three decades at the company. HERZOG LANDED AT Oris by luck, if you can call it that. The year was 1978. His training was in banking, and after school he had worked for a Basel-based trading company and then for Chevron Oil, at the company’s Basel office. But when his oil job required him to move to Zurich, Herzog, who had spent most of his life in or near Basel, decided to stay put in his hometown. To do that, he needed a job there. He found one at Oris, where he took charge of marketing and sales. The trouble was, Oris, like the rest of the Swiss watch industry, was in dire
straits. The world’s first quartz watch, from Seiko, had appeared on the market nine years earlier. Swiss companies had scrambled to convert to quartz, but the process had been sclerotic. Between 1974 and 1978, Swiss watch production had fallen from 87 million to 63 million watches. As a result, hundreds of Swiss watch companies had closed. (By 1980, the figure would be over 1,000.) Swiss watch industry employment was, of course, also plummeting, and by 1980 would fall to half its 1970 level. (It dropped even more in the following years.) Oris made some mechanical watches, but mostly quartz ones. The quartz business was perilous, Herzog recalls. Quartz watch prices were falling precipitously as quartz-watch makers improved their manufacturing technology and produced higher volumes. Economies of scale came into play. “It was really a tough time. I didn’t know if I bought quartz movements at a certain price, could I sell them at the price I paid or if it would be lower
PROFILE
Oris
still. You can imagine [what it is like] if you buy something and you don’t know if it will be half price in another six months,” Herzog says. The mechanical-watch business was, for Oris at least, more stable. The company had carved out a place for itself in certain markets in Africa, mostly British Commonwealth countries including Kenya and Nigeria, and in South America. In 1979, Oris even opened an assembly plant in Nigeria, transferring eight Swiss watchmakers to work there, because the Nigerian government didn’t allow the import of finished watches. The lifeline from Africa helped Oris for a while. “Then the crisis really started to become nasty,” Herzog says. “The whole [ASUAG] group was in jeopardy.” Including, not surprisingly, Oris. “They didn’t know what to do with us because we generated no profit. Do we close it down?” Oris headquarters in Hölstein, near Basel
ULTIMATELY, ASUAG decided instead to sell it. In 1982, longtime Oris chief Rolf Portmann led a management buyout of the company. (He had joined Oris as a young lawyer in 1956; now in his 80s, he is the company’s honorary chairman.) He asked Herzog, who also took a stake in Oris, to become CEO. Oris was one of several brands ASUAG sold between 1982 and 1984. Others included Arsa, Atlantic, Edox, Rotary, and Technos. (In 1983, ASUAG merged with Switzerland’s other watch group, SSIH, to form SMH, now known as the Swatch Group.) By the time of the buyout, Oris was a shadow of its former self. From 1978 to ’82, about 150 Oris employees had been laid off; some 200 remained at the time of the sale. Just 12 years earlier, in 1970, Oris had been one of the 10 largest watch companies in the world, employing 800 people and making 1.2 million watches and clocks per year. It had had some 10 factories in Switzerland, including a dial factory in Bienne and a decolletage facility in Malleray. By 1982, though, it had just three or four factories, Herzog recalls. The Oris workforce soon shrank further. Herzog discontinued the company’s manufacturing operations and laid off another 160 or so employees, leaving 35 or 40, enough to handle marketing, sales,
Ulrich Herzog and Rolf Portmann in 1982, the year they bought Oris
after-sales service, and some assembly. From that point on, Oris had its watches made by subcontractors. The new owners’ immediate and urgent task was selling their inventory of 200,000 to 300,000 watches, including many mechanicals. “We knew the first thing we had to do was to reduce that heavy stock and turn it into cash; that’s how we can build the future. We really had to get it moving,” Herzog says. Unloading the watches was a struggle, but Oris soon faced an even bigger one: figuring out what to do next. The Swiss watch industry was in chaos. It was being restructured from top to bottom; movement production was being shifted to a single central producer, ETA; mechanical watches were dying but Swiss companies lagged far behind the Japanese in making quartz ones. For a time, Herzog says, the company had no clear strategy. The Swiss watch industry, Oris included, faced the same dilemma all industries face in times of unexpected, sudden upheavals. “You don’t know where to go; you just have to survive,” Herzog says.
THEN HE HAD a brainstorm. In 1985, he traveled to Japan and made a gamechanging discovery. In that birthplace of quartz watches, young people were, against all odds, falling in love with mechanical ones. “People between 20 and 25 wanted to have something they could listen to, they could wind,” Herzog says. At the time, Japan was a technological and economic superpower, poised, it seemed, to dictate consumer trends all over the world. As with Walkmans, so with watches, Herzog concluded: the mechanical would come back. He jumped on the idea, taking mechanical movements from the old stock he and Portmann had bought, equipping them with additional functions such as a moon-phase display and putting them in new cases designed to appeal to young urban sophisticates. One popular design featured a center-mounted pointer calendar, inspired by an Oris watch from 1938. (The pointer calendar became a kind of Oris hallmark and is used in the line to this day.) He shifted his focus from thirdworld markets to wealthy, industrialized
Oris at a Glance Headquarters: Hölstein, switzerland, about 20 miles southeast of Basel OwnersHip: shareholders include executive Chairman ulrich Herzog (he holds the largest, but not a majority, share), Honorary Chairman rolf portmann and members of his family COMpanY CHieF: ulrich Herzog, in charge of operations for 31 years prOduCts: Mechanical watches priced from $1,000 to $5,000, containing eta movements assembled by sellita or sellita-made movements. there are four product groups: Culture (dress watches, including those in the Jazz series), diving, aviation and Motor sport sales BY Market: asia, 48%; americas, 12%, europe, 35%; others, 5% eMplOYees: 60 at facility in Hölstein, 70 more in Oris subsidiaries in the u.s., europe and asia
The center-mounted pointer calendar, which debuted in 1938, is one of the brand’s signature features.
ones. “From that point on, we didn’t sell any mechanicals cheap,” Herzog says. He tackled the Japanese market first, then moved on to Europe, where Oris had been doing almost no business. “It was really tough to get the distribution,” he recalls. Traditional jewelry stores, even in Japan, at first wanted nothing to do with mechanical watches which, in their eyes, were outmoded nuisances. “You couldn’t go into a jewelry store: they would say you are crazy. What are you doing with these mechanical watches? We want quartz.” Herzog had to turn instead to
upmarket specialty stores that attracted fashion-conscious customers, like the British clothing retailer Paul Smith, which was one of the first stores to sell the new Oris mechanicals. Herzog set up a training program to teach store salespeople, many of whom had grown up in a quartzdominated world, how a mechanical watch works. Oris, Herzog notes with some pride, was among the first watch brands to make a push for mechanical watches. “We were pioneers,” he says. As the decade progressed, mechanical watches gained traction. Year by year
PROFILE
Oris
An Oris Timeline 1904 Oris is founded in Hölstein, switzerland, by paul Cattin and Georges Christian, both from le locle. they name the company after a nearby brook.
1939 to 1945 during world war ii, Oris is better known for its alarm clocks than its wristwatches.
An Oris alarm clock from the 1940s Oris founders Cattin and Christian
1906 to 1925 the company opens five additional factories in switzerland.
A painting from 1929 shows Oris factories in six Swiss towns.
1910 Oris, with 300 workers, is the largest employer in Hölstein. 1927 when Georges Christian dies, Oris is bought by a group of his family’s friends. the watchmaker Jacques-david leCoultre, grandson of the famed antoine leCoultre, becomes president. He is also managing director of leCoultre and, after that company merges with edmond Jaeger in 1937, of Jaeger- leCoultre. 1928 Oscar Herzog, brother-in-law of Georges Christian (and not related to Oris’s current executive chairman, ulrich Herzog) becomes managing director.
1952 Oris launches its first automatic watch.
1969 Oris reaches the peak of its production, making 1.2 million watches. the company employs 800 people and is one of the 10 largest watch companies in the world. 1970 the company is sold to the swiss holding company asuaG (later to merge with another holding company, ssiH, to form what is now the swatch Group). that same year, Oris introduces its first chronograph, the Chronoris, which is also the first auto-racing-related Oris watch. later, auto-themed watches would become a pillar of the brand.
1988 Oris launches alarm wristwatches incorporating old a. schild movements that Herzog has bought.
1997 the company launches the worldtimer, containing Caliber 690, which lets the wearer adjust the time forward or backward in one-hour jumps using pushers on the side of the case. the watch also has a patented system in which the date jumps backward if the local time is moved back over midnight.
Alarm watch from 1988
1992 the company shifts its production entirely to mechanical watches.
The first Oris automatic
1956 Oscar Herzog hires rolf portmann and assigns him the task of working to overturn a swiss law that is preventing Oris from switching from making pin-lever escapements to making more expensive swiss lever ones. the law, called the watch statute, passed in 1934, says no watch company can make such a change without the government’s permission. Oris has been denied permission repeatedly.
The Chronoris, Oris’s first chronograph
1996 Oris launches a watch in conjunction with saxophonist andy sheppard. it is the first watch in the brand’s series of jazz watches. in subsequent years, the company would introduce watches bearing the names of jazz greats louis armstrong, Miles davis, duke ellington, Charlie parker and others.
2002 the red winding rotor, used on most of the brand’s automatic watches, becomes a trademarked symbol of Oris.
1982 rolf portmann and ulrich Herzog buy Oris. 1984 the company introduces a watch with center-mounted calendar pointer, based on an Oris watch from 1938. the calendar pointer would become one of the brand’s best-known features.
The red winding rotor is an Oris hallmark.
2006 a watch bearing the name of freediver Carlos Coste is introduced. Called the Carlos Coste limited edition Chronograph, it’s the first watch in Oris’s divers collection.
Mid-’80s Herzog starts shifting Oris’s production away from quartz watches and back to mechanical ones.
1966 after a decade of campaigning to have the watch statute reversed, portmann succeeds, and Oris is allowed to make swiss lever escapement watches. its first is the automatic Caliber 645. 1968 Oris is awarded its first chronometer certificate, by the Observatoire astronomique et Chronométrique in neuchâtel, for Caliber 652.
The WorldTimer, with Caliber 690
2008 the company launches its BC4 Flight timer, which tells the time in three time zones, one of which is adjusted using a vertical crown at 2 o’clock. The Andy Sheppard watch, the first of the Oris jazz watches
2013 Oris introduces the aquis depth Gauge, which indicates depth by means of a circular channel surrounding the dial. Oris holds a patent on the device: it is the first time such a gauge has been used in a wristwatch.
Oris shifted more of its production out of quartz and into mechanicals. In 1992, Herzog says, Oris stopped making quartz watches altogether. In the meantime, Herzog had made another important decision: unlike most other mechanical-watch brands, which focused on the top tier of the market, Oris was going to be a value-oriented brand aimed at everyday people. “We wanted to produce watches for you and me, and not just for some high-end people who have more money than they know what to do with. That is our mission: to make watches for people who work and want to have a nice product.” Today, most Oris watches are between $1,000 and $5,000, with the heaviest concentration between $2,000 and $3,000. As the mechanical-watch revival gained force, Herzog looked for ways to distinguish his models from the growing competition. He began embellishing the ETA movements he was buying – they were assembled by Sellita, with whom ETA contracted to do assembly − with various complications to give his watches a distinctive look. “We really started to become a mechanical company with our own faces. Just to take standard movements from ETA wouldn’t have been enough,” he says. TODAY HERZOG FOLLOWS the same principle; he has vowed to put technical innovations on the front burner. This year’s introduction of the Aquis Depth Gauge is a good example of the path he’s pursuing. The watch measures water depth by allowing water to flow into a circular channel on the perimeter of the dial. The watch has a patent: a depth gauge of this type has never been used on a watch before. Another such technical milestone was the Rotation Safety System, which prevents the rotating bezel from being knocked off position accidentally during a dive. The device, launched in 2009, is used on watches in the ProDiver collection. Herzog says he will pick up the pace in launching technical innovations and aims to bring out one new patented device every year from now on. Whatever new doodads his research and development team comes up with,
PROFILE
Oris
they’ll need to adhere to Herzog’s golden rule: keep costs, and hence prices, down. “When we start to develop a product, we say this product must be in this price range. The designers have to work within those limits,” he says. “With the new depth gauge, for instance, it was very important to keep the price low. At first we thought it was such a clever idea that maybe we should make the price higher, but then decided at the end that the price determines if someone can buy it.” The watch sells for $3,500. Low prices, of course, require high volumes. “If you start making small quantities per model, you’re not able to keep the prices down. That is key to our strategy. We must have volume.” Herzog won’t say how many watches he makes, but sources put the figure at nearly 100,000 pieces per year. The brand’s cost restrictions mean Oris will never make its own movements, Herzog says. Right now he buys ETA movements, assembled by Sellita, and Sellita clones of ETA movements. If he didn’t have access to large numbers of movements at moderate prices, he’d have to raise his own prices and the brand would lose its raison d’être, he says. His stance has put him at odds with the Swatch Group in its current drive to force watch brands to make their own movements. He finds the Swatch Group’s campaign ironic. After all, in the early ’80s, he recalls, ASUAG and the banks that bailed it out wanted Oris and other brands to shut down their movement factories and buy from ETA. That arrangement became the basis of the industry’s life-saving restructuring: production was streamlined and duplicative labor elimi-
nated. Now the Swatch Group wants to curtail ETA’s movement sales to outside brands, forcing the brands to become movement makers once again, three decades after they shuttered their factories at ASUAG’s request. Companies like his can’t afford to do that, he says. Herzog voiced his objections to the Swatch Group’s efforts in Bern in June. There, at a hearing held by COMCO, the Swiss Competition Commission, he – and many other Swiss watch executives − laid out their case that the Swatch Group was being unfair. More than unfair, actually: “I told them this was ridiculous. They told us to close down the factory [in the early 1980s], and now they tell us we’re stupid not to build our own movement factory,” he says with a laugh, not entirely amused. Whatever COMCO’s ruling about the long-term future (the commission is allowing some additional cuts next year, but has said nothing about the years after that), Oris will be able to get enough movements, he says. The brand has been a big Sellita customer for more than 40 years, and hence gets priority for the ETA movements it assembles. Plus, Sellita is building up its capacity to make more movements in house. In short, Oris should be set for a long time, ETA cutbacks or no, Herzog says.
The ProDiver Pointer Moon and Aquis DepthGauge, examples of Oris’s technical innovations
TACTICS We strapped the Oris Aquis Depth Gauge to the wrist of a diver to see how it, and its depth gauge, performed under the pressure of a deep-sea submersion. By JENS Koch PhoToS By oK-PhoToGraPhy aND FrEDErIK FraNKE
TEST
Oris Aquis Depth Gauge
ens Köppe squints in the bright sunlight and inhales deeply. Then he gasps a few times like a fish out of water to force a bit more air into the outermost corners of his lungs. Köppe, a free diver, acts as if he is breathing his last breath. And so he is, for awhile: during the brief, subaqueous eternity he’s about to experience, these lastminute gulps are all the air he will get. Köppe slowly submerges into the depths, descending hand under hand along a vertical cable. He pauses every few meters, squeezes his nostrils shut and presses air into his ears to prevent his eardrums from rupturing. He glides farther downward, passing first the cable’s 10-meter mark, then its 20-meter mark. He can hold his breath for more than six minutes, thanks to the intensive training he’s undergone. Expanding the lungs is half the trick; the other half is to expel as much air as possible so that he can inhale fresh, oxygen-rich air.
We’re here with him on Tenerife in the Canary Islands to test the Oris Aquis Depth Gauge. It’s strapped to Köppe’s wrist as he descends to 30 meters, then turns around and begins the strong, regular, pulling motions that propel him toward the surface. The watch’s depth gauge is based on an appealingly simple principle: the Boyle-Mariotte law, which states that the volume of a gas is inversely proportional to the pressure exerted on it. For example, doubling the pressure on a given volume of air will halve that volume. Depth gauges based on this principle aren’t new: they consist of a nearly circular tubule that’s closed on one end and marked with a calibrated scale. The depth is read at the position on the scale where compressed air meets penetrating water. Watches with this type of depth gauge aren’t new, either. The first was probably the FavreLeuba Bathy 50, which debuted in 1966. Other manufacturers followed. But watches of this sort always had a separate tubule, positioned either above or around the crystal, which made them somewhat unwieldy. Oris is the first manufacturer to integrate the depth gauge into the watch’s crystal. To achieve this, the engi-
We tested the Oris during a “free” dive, in which the diver descends as far as possible on just one breath.
TEST
Oris Aquis Depth Gauge
The watch is very large (46 mm wide and 15 mm thick) but nonetheless comfortable to wear.
neers milled a uniform groove and an exterior opening at 12 o’clock to allow water to penetrate into the crystal. Together with the crystal’s insulation, this creates a channel that can hold water. Oris prints the gauge’s scale in yellow on the underside of the crystal and directly alongside the pressurized tubule, where it’s readily legible. The company chose yellow because tests show that yellow calibrations are easiest to read. A SPECIAL FEATURE of this type of diving scale is that the values increase exponentially. This means that depths from zero to 10 meters are most accurately displayed; those between 10 and 20 meters are legible only to the nearest meter; and at depths below 30 meters, the scale is accurate only to the nearest 10 meters. Of course, this is fine in shallow water, but it’s a disadvantage at greater depths. Then again, an amateur diver shouldn’t descend below 30 meters, and the scale is accurate enough to that depth. One advantage of this type of gauge is that its display is instantaneous. Because of its construction, there is no friction to
overcome, so it immediately registers each vertical motion in the water. This is not always the case with mechanical depth gauges that indicate depth using hands. In a hand-type depth gauge, the pressure of the water compresses a membrane, spring or similar component. This motion is then conveyed to a hand that sweeps along a calibrated scale. Gauges with hands often respond only to big changes in depth because they need a lot of energy to prevail over friction. Our test showed that Oris’s depth gauge is remarkably accurate. When our diving computer indicated 24.7 meters, the watch showed approximately 25 meters: a difference of just 1.2 percent. (According to the diving computer’s manufacturer, its readings differ by less than 1 percent from the actual depth.) Due to the construction of a Boyle-Mariotte depth gauge, differences between air and water temperature can sometimes cause imprecise readings: if the air temperature is 40 degrees C in the sun, for instance, and the water is 20 degrees C, the volume of air in the gauge will shrink by about 5 percent when the watch is submerged,
The watch contains the Sellita SW 200, a clone of the ETA 2824.
SPECS ORIS AQUIS DEPTH GAUGE Jens Köppe (right) is a free diver and diving instructor and proprietor of the Scubamarine diving school in Ulm, Germany.
Manufacturer: Oris SA, Ribigasse 1, CH-4434 Hölstein, Switzerland Reference number: 733 7675 4154 Set Functions: Hours, minutes, seconds, date, depth gauge, stop-seconds function Movement: Sellita SW 200, automatic, 28,800 vph, 26 jewels, Incabloc shock absorption, Etachron fine adjustment with eccentric screw, 38-hour power reserve, diameter = 25.6 mm, height = 4.6 mm
The Oris depth gauge shows about 25 meters and our diving computer reads 24.7 meters – a very small difference.
due to cooling. However, the effect will usually be less than that because most divers spend some time floating on the water’s surface before diving, so the air in the watch has time to cool, thus lessening the temperature difference between it and the water. IT ISN’T JUST THE DEPTH gauge that deserves praise: the watch has other impressive features. Köppe liked its easy-tograsp, fluted bezel, although it requires a fair amount of force to rotate. It clicks neatly into place in half-minute increments. The black satin-finished ceramic inlays on the bezel not only look good, they also prevent scratches on the exposed upper surface. Our test left obvious
traces on the partially polished clasp, but no scratches could be seen on the case. The watch is also easy to read, Köppe said: the luminous markings on the bezel glow clearly in the dark, as do the hands and indices. The dive time and the time of day can be quickly read by daylight, too. Another advantage of Oris’s depth scale: no additional hands clutter the tidy dial. The crown screws into the case and is easy to use. The crown protector, which is screwed on, offers extra security in case of a sharp blow. The crown, along with the fully threaded, screw-in back and thick crystal, provides water resistance of 500 meters despite the channel for the depth gauge. This offers a sufficient margin of safety for diving and also ensures
Case: Stainless steel, unidirectional rotating bezel with ceramic inlays, domed sapphire crystal is nonreflective on the inside, screwed crown; fully threaded, screw-in back made of stainless steel; water resistant to 500 m Strap and clasp: Rubber strap, stainlesssteel folding clasp that enables strap to be lengthened in steps, additional stainless-steel bracelet Rate results: Deviations in seconds per 24 hours Dial up
+2
Dial down
+3
Crown up
+5
Crown down
+1
Crown left
+1
Crown right
+3
Greatest deviation of rate Average deviation
4 +2.5
Average amplitude: Flat positions
300°
Hanging positions
281°
Dimensions: Diameter = 46 mm, height = 15 mm, weight = 181 g Price: $3,500
that the watch can withstand a sudden increase in pressure caused by, for instance, a jump off a high diving board. The strap, made of rubber, can be adjusted: another useful feature. The clasp has two buttons you can use to lengthen the strap. You do so in four increments, which provide a total of 16 additional millimeters of length. You can make the strap another four centimeters longer using the holes in the strap, which are like those in a conventional, prongbuckle strap. Because you can lengthen the strap so much, you can wear the watch over the sleeve of even the thickest wetsuit. This is an important plus that many divers’ watches lack, Köppe said. The strap’s end is shaped like an anchor to ensure that it can’t slide through its clasp. Only after you compress its end can it be threaded through the buckle. This guarantees that your watch won’t fall off, even in the unlikely event that the doubly pronged clasp releases by accident. The watch comes with a metal bracelet and a screwdriver to use when switching from one strap to the other. (Tools for cleaning the depth gauge are also included.)
THE AQUIS DEPTH GAUGE is well suited for diving. Its big, bold, nononsense appearance instantly identifies it as a genuine divers’ watch. It also looks very sporty thanks to the massive screwed lugs; black, satin-finished ceramic scale around the rotatable bezel; yellow dive scale; and rubber strap. And it doesn’t look gigantic either, even though it has an ample diameter of 46 mm. Nor does it feel terribly large: it fits surprisingly snugly thanks to its long, deeply curved lugs and its flexible rubber strap. The fact that the end of the strap lies against the wrist, protecting the skin from the clasp, makes the watch very comfortable, as does the case’s smooth back. The workmanship is a sight for sore eyes: everything is neatly crafted, although we did find minor tool marks on the inner side of the strap. A table for converting from meters to feet and vice versa is engraved on the caseback. The watch contains a Sellita movement, the automatic SW 200, a clone of ETA’s time-honored Caliber 2824. Oris adorned it with its signature red rotor. Famed as a robust movement, it is also a precise one, achieving good
TEST
Oris Aquis Depth Gauge
The clasp enables you to lengthen the strap in four increments, for a total of 16 mm. The holes in the strap let you extend it another 4 cm.
SCORES ORIS AQUIS DEPTH GAUGE Strap and clasp (max. 10 points): The strap can be lengthened as much as needed to fit over a wetsuit. Both strap and clasp are sturdy and secure. 9 Operation (5): The screwed crown and the divers’ bezel are easy to operate; the watch also has a stop-seconds function. 5 Case (10): The thick, domed sapphire crystal is highly pressure-resistant; ceramic in bezel resists scratches; craftsmanship is good except for a few tiny tool marks. 8 Design (15): The watch is attractive, sporty and distinctive and has appealing details such as the screwed crown protectors. 13 Legibility (5): The legibility is good in all lighting conditions thanks to the very high contrast between the hands and dial and because luminous material is used even on the seconds hand and bezel. 5 Wearing comfort (10): The supple rubber strap and smooth caseback make this big Oris comfortable to wear. 9 Movement (20): A clone of the reliable and time-tested ETA 2824. 11 Rate results (10): This Oris impressed its testers, who measured only slight deviations among the several positions and a small average gain; the amplitude remained stable, too. 9 Overall value (15): Very good costbenefit ratio; other mechanical watches with depth gauges cost several times as much as this one. 14 TOTAL:
83 POINTS
results on our timing machine. It gained between one and five seconds per day in the various positions. The average daily gain was just 2.5 seconds per day. The amplitude remained high and stable in all positions. The watch’s rate is praiseworthy and so, too, is its cost-benefit ratio. The Aquis Depth Gauge is only $3,500 (there’s also a slightly smaller and less water-resistant model with no depth gauge, the Aquis Date, for just $1,650). The watch’s functions, craftsmanship and numerous elaborate details would justify a higher price. There are other watches with mechanical depth gauges on the market –
from Jaeger-LeCoultre, IWC and Blancpain − and they cost several times more than Oris’s watch. They have additional features the Oris does not have, such as a second time zone, a helium escape valve, and/or a split hand that allows you to keep track of your maximum depth throughout the dive, all of which contribute to the higher price. Panerai has a watch with an electronic depth gauge, and it is also much more expensive than the Oris. The Aquis Depth Gauge is a handsome, distinctive and sporty watch that combines good craftsmanship, accurate timekeeping and a low price.