41,873 articles · 276 videos found · page 344 of 1405
Fratello
We haven’t heard much from Synchron since the summer of 2023, but the beginning of 2026 has brought good tidings. The new Sealab Ti300M sports a familiar look, yet it brings modern features appreciated by collectors. We’ll follow this introduction up with a hands-on review next month. For now, though, let’s take a brief look […] Visit Introducing: The Synchron Sealab Ti300M to read the full article.
Monochrome
In the ever-increasing world of restomods, remasters, continuation cars and so on, some projects raise the question of why it hadn’t been done before. By now, we’re well familiar with the slew of Porsches from Singer, Nardone, Tuthill, KAMM and so on, but there are plenty of brilliant machines out there to receive the same […]
Fratello
Makina is a brand that has repeatedly challenged us with its modern creations. They are sometimes brutalistic, sometimes futuristic, but always pushing the boundaries of watch design. With the new Andras_II, the Filipino brand has updated its take on a classic dress watch. Just one glance at the Andras_II Gray immediately told me there was […] Visit Hands-On With The Surprising Makina Andras_II Gray to read the full article.
Fratello
With the blazing Sun reflecting off the snow, the crimson dial of the Oris Artelier Year Of The Horse Limited Edition looked ever so vibrant and fiery. The famous Matterhorn provided no shade; it just stood there magnificently, creating the perfect backdrop. Traditionally, Oris chooses Zermatt to mark the start of a new watch year. […] Visit A Hands-On Introduction To The Oris Artelier Year Of The Horse Limited Edition In Zermatt to read the full article.
Worn & Wound
Joe Ottati is the owner of Ottati Car Detailing, a founder of VALT Auto Club, and a part-time Auction Specialist for Cars & Bids. He is also a co-host of the VALT podcast, which can be found on YouTube. Soft-spoken but always ready for a chat, many Bay Area car enthusiasts have likely had a conversation with Joe Ottati from the other side of a folding table, beneath a big VALT Auto Club tent. As one of the club’s founders, Ottati’s dedication to growing the car scene in the Bay Area and keeping it as inclusive and positive as possible can easily be seen in the way he interacts with everyone that comes through the tent: with kindness and small hints of the vast wealth of car knowledge within. But cars aren’t Ottati’s only hobby; he extends that interest in all things mechanical to his wrist, too. Like most of us watch nerds, Ottati’s first timepiece came in the form of a Casio. As an 8th grade graduation gift, he received a green G-SHOCK, a watch that he still owns. “It still keeps accurate time on the same battery, fourteen years later,” he says. We are currency outside his shop in Concord, where he details cars as his main job. Inside, a smörgåsbord of European beauties lie in wait, but he steers the conversation back to watches, first. “After graduating high school, I was gifted an Autodromo Stradale, which was my first mechanical watch,” he explains, “I wore it literally every day for years.” The exhibition caseback displaying the Miyota moveme...
Monochrome
If I had to describe the return of L.Leroy, once one of France’s most illustrious watchmaking houses, with its name respected as much as those of Breguet and Ferdinand Berthoud, it was very theatrical. Founded in 1785 by Charles Leroy in Paris, it became famous for its marine chronometers, regulator clocks, and commissions for European […]
Monochrome
The life of an independent watchmaker, or a duo in this case, is hardly ever easy. Roope Kortela and Rene Valta, who you might know from the portrait we produced about a year ago, are pulling the covers off their next watch, but some challenges had to be overcome. When we first spoke with the […]
Hodinkee
How the watch industry navigated its most structurally challenging year in a decade and what to look out for in 2026.
SJX Watches
The Toka from Finnish duo Roope Kortela and René Valta reflects the ongoing appeal of beautifully finished, time-only watches, combining a thoughtfully reworked historical calibre with the brand’s first champlevé enamel dial. With an emphasis on high-grade finishing and increasingly in-house components - including a proprietary free-sprung balance - the Toka is a strong sophomore effort from the startup independent. Rene Valta (foreground) and Roope Kortela Initial thoughts It’s been more than 25 years since Philippe Dufour unveiled the Simplicity, a watch that challenged prevailing wisdom about what fine watchmaking was all about. Launched at a time when brands and collectors were focused on complications, the Simplicity arguably created the niche for highly finished time-only watches and intensified collector focus on independent watchmaking in general. Though the field has become crowded over the past quarter-century, collector demand has proven durable. The Toka is a watch built in this tradition. The Omega calibre inside the Toka has been heavily reworked by Kortela Valta. The watchmakers kept most of the original architecture intact, while applying high-end finishing top to bottom. Furthermore, since the start of 2025, the watchmaking duo has expanded the list of components they’re able to make in-house, including the new free-sprung balance that differentiates the Toka from the Eka and Oma models that preceded it. The Toka features a fairly traditional...
Hodinkee
A treasure trove of living machines from the king of mechanical artistry.
Two Broke Watch Snobs
Looking for a tool watch you can trust and actually rely on? We break down the watches that survived real testing and explain what they do well and where they fall short.
Monochrome
It has been a while since we last saw a tonneau-shaped Seiko Presage… The last to surface on MONOCHROME was the Presage Enamel SPB049 from 2017, a quietly unusual model that stood apart from the round, conservative silhouettes that dominate Seiko’s classical offerings, or the 2019 Zen Garden SARY111 (SRPD05/07) series. But here we are […]
Worn & Wound
If I’m looking back at 2025, it feels like the year I really embraced independent brands across price points. If you’ve listened to the podcast, talked to me at a watch event, or read between the lines of many of the articles I’ve written over the last few years, you’ll know that I’ve become increasingly bored with “big” brands and the new watches they push out to market on predictable release cycles, year in and year out. 2025 was the year that that boredom and frustration really made an impact on the purchases I decided to make. I won’t lie: I went a little overboard on new watches last year. Not having children, owning a car that’s fully paid off, and living in a world where retail therapy is often the most reliable form of comfort will do that to you. In the last year, I picked up new watches from Ming, Otsuka Lotec, Arcanaut, Louis Erard, Selten, Typsim, Christopher Ward, Nomos, and Arken. I’m happy to say that every single one of them is a little weird (Or special? Maybe that’s a better word.) and I’m very pleased to say that in just about every case I have some personal connective tie to the brand or the people behind it. That’s a thing that has become almost essential to me as I consider a new watch: I want to know the people who made it, understand their philosophy, and, if I can, develop an ongoing relationship with them. That’s a goal that’s easier to meet now than ever given the ease with which we all connect on social media, at ...
Monochrome
Forgive the lyrical tone, but to encounter a Moritz Grossmann watch is to feel time transformed into form and substance. These are timepieces that are great to look at and study in detail with a loupe, but also wonderful to experience through touch, balance, and inner rhythm. Since Christine Hutter revived the storied name in […]
Worn & Wound
One of the most reliable events on the watch release calendar every year is a glut of new watches in January celebrating the lunar new year, which this year begins on February 17. This is a very important holiday in many Asian countries, and brands with an international focus are not shy about dropping limited editions throughout the month to appeal (primarily) to customers in those territories. Of course, very often the watches themselves are quite cool outside the context of the lunar new year celebration itself, and it’s always kind of a fun spectator sport to see what brands come up with. Typically, brands will riff on the animal associated with a given year, and this year it’s the fire horse. First out of the gate: Oris, with the new Year of the Horse Limited Edition. The Year of the Horse Limited Edition can be defined by two prominent features: deep red tones, and the use of the Calibre 113 movement. The movement is somewhat unusual and not used frequently in the Oris catalog, so we’ll start there. This is a manually wound caliber with an impressive ten day power reserve, and also includes a “business calendar” that provides the day, date, and also displays the week of the year via a scale at the dial’s perimeter. The week indicator is an unusual, old-fashioned feature that holds a lot of charm, and provides an easy visual reference for how deep we are into a given year. The watch has a dark red dial with lighter red fumé subdials at 3 and 9 that in...
Hodinkee
If you're a vintage lover who thought the days of modern 36mm ultra-thin perpetual calendars were behind us, Vacheron has your back. But how does it stack up?
Fratello
What happens when sartorialists Mark Cho and Elliot Hammer (respectively, the founder and the creative director of The Armoury) come up with a watch brand of their own? Let’s find out in this hands-on review of the Temporal Works Series A line. The Armoury’s Temporal Works In case you are unfamiliar with The Armoury, it’s […] Visit Hands-On: The Temporal Works Series A to read the full article.
Monochrome
Fitting for a brand that harnesses the horsepower of the racetrack in its watches, TAG Heuer releases a Carrera Chronograph to celebrate the Year of the Fire Horse. Representing the seventh animal sign in the Chinese zodiac, the horse will rule the roost of the 12 zodiac animals starting on 17 February 2026. The model […]
Monochrome
After the now-cult-classic MIH Watch of 2005, an overtly minimalist Annual Calendar Chronograph developed by Ludwig Oechslin and Paul Gerber, and the Gaïa Watch series launched in 2019, the 2024 edition continues the museum’s approach to watchmaking. Indeed, before launching his own brand, Ochs und Junior, Oechslin was the curator of the Musée International d’Horologerie […]
Worn & Wound
I’m not going to lie to you, I love a bit of intrigue. When I was a child, I would write notes to my mother in invisible ink made of lemon juice. When someone tells me to keep a secret (which is always a surprise, given my big mouth), I can hardly contain my excitement. And, even now, I fancy myself a real James Bond type when I hide the Amazon boxes from my husband before he comes home from work. Luckily for me, Bernhardt Watch Company just announced their Cipher Diver, which sits right at the cross-section of two of my hobbies: watches and subterfuge. Inspired by Thomas Jefferson (and, impressively, made in partnership with Monticello), the watch nods more to the third president’s inventive streak than his political career – including the rotating wheel cipher, a mechanical concept designed to encode messages through a specific alignment of letters across a series of discs. The result is a diver that cleverly allows you to keep a secret message right on your wrist. Beneath the bezel, Bernhardt has included the alphabet printed on UV-reactive ink. By aligning the bezel to a designated hour key and referencing minute markers on the dial, one is able to use the clock’s timekeeping functionality to decode the message. If that’s not some National Treasure type of ingenuity, I don’t know what is. Each diver comes with a UV decoding torch and an initial cipher card, with new encrypted messages released weekly through July 4, 2026 (the 250th anniversary of the Unit...
Deployant
Seiko 145 anniversary of the founding of Seiko by Kintaro Hattori releases 4 new models in their key collections of King Seiko, Prospex, Pressage and Aston.
Two Broke Watch Snobs
See which vintage reissue watches actually held up during our testing. Use our hands-on insights to choose the one that fits your lifestyle and budget.
Fratello
It has become a tradition for Seiko to be the first brand to introduce new watches every year. This time, it’s not just one or two but a full quartet of new pieces. To celebrate the brand’s 145th anniversary, Seiko has announced four models that perfectly represent different pillars of the collection. We had the […] Visit Seiko Introduces A Series of 145th-Anniversary Watches To Start The New Year to read the full article.
Hodinkee
The same great framework with a new beige twist results in a really attractive watch.
Hodinkee
Artist and educator Suzanne Dirks asks a deceptively simple question: Do public clocks still organize how we move through New York City, or have they begun to fade into the background?
Teddy Baldassarre
One of the first hurdles to clear for newcomers to watch appreciation is the clarification of two very common horological categories: chronograph vs. chronometer. Quite simply, a chronometer (from the Greek chronos, meaning time, and meter, meaning measure) is any watch or clock that keeps reliably accurate time, usually as determined by an outside independent testing agency, whereas a chronograph (from chronos and graph, i.e., to “write time”) is any watch or clock with the ability to track and record intervals of time, aka a stopwatch. This is, again, the simplest way to look at it. But there’s a bit more to both chronometers and chronographs that a knowledge-hungry watch enthusiast might want to digest - including the fact that the terms are not interchangeable but also not mutually exclusive. [toc-section heading="Chronometers Defined"] Our original, classical definition of a chronometer can be traced back to the golden age of seafaring exploration in the 18th Century, when ships required the use of a highly accurate onboard clock that enabled their navigators to determine longitude in order to avoid the perils of running aground or veering hopelessly off course. The man credited with developing the first of these “marine chronometers” was legendary British watchmaker John Harrison; his invention facilitated the celestial navigation used at the time by navigators at sea to determine their ship’s position in coordination with a sextant. Marine chronome...
Monochrome
Kurono Tokyo, the accessible brand of independent watchmaker Hajime Asaoka, had quite a run last year, with a lot of impressive new models, most dedicated to celebrating its founder’s 60th anniversary. This includes the handsome Grand Jubilee Calendar Salmon, the Ice Blue 2025 Jubilee Sensu EOL, or the 34mm Star Dial watches. Starting 2026 with […]
Worn & Wound
Kurono Tokyo, Hajime Asaoka’s approachable watch brand, has introduced their first new release of 2026 on the very first workday of the year. Nothing like getting right back into the swing of things. The new piece, part of the brand’s “Special Projects” series, introduces meteorite to the collection for the first time. The Inseki features many of the Kurono hallmarks that have made the brand a favorite among enthusiasts over these last several years, while riding a trend in watchmaking in a rather elegant way that still feels appropriate for the brand. The centerpiece of the watch is the gray meteorite dial, taken from the Muonionalusta meteorite which fell in what is now Sweden about one million years ago. The small slab of meteorite, with the familiar striations that make the material so interesting, is surrounded by a white lacquered outer ring where you’ll find Asaoka’s custom “Calligra” typeface numerals, which have been painted in high relief. It’s a really spare execution, accented by hand bent, high polish steel hands, a design detail that has become a Kurono signature. Kurono notes that, as with all meteorite dials, no two are exactly the same. Asaoka, in the press materials for the Inseki, further explains that sometimes the variance in this material results in a piece of meteorite that is not particularly visually interesting. For this release, Asaoka has personally selected each piece of meteorite for inclusion in the Inseki’s run, and t...
Deployant
TAG Heuer's release for the Chinese New Year of the Horse is now released and available immediately. The watch is based on the Carrera Chronograph.
Two Broke Watch Snobs
A hands-on review of the Aquastar Benthos Professional, exploring its slimmer case, bright lume, ISOfrane strap, and real-world wearability.
Question, suggestion, or just want to say hi? Drop a note.