Selecting Dive Watches: Form and Function
Look to the classics for a watch that can do it all and look good doing it. To keep water out, get a high-quality item with a screw-down crown. For dive watches, luminosity is crucial since it makes it easier to read the time in murky conditions. It's also essential to have a unidirectional bezel to prevent unintentionally reducing your no-decompression limit.
1. Resistance to water
2. Case materials
The demands of the underwater environment, such as fluctuating pressure and temperature swings, must be tolerated by dive watches. Dynamic pressure tests, in which the watch is evaluated for water resistance under various situations while enclosed in a chamber, are commonly conducted by manufacturers.
A dive watch's case material must to be resistant to corrosion. Look for materials like titanium or stainless steel, which strike an excellent balance between weight and durability. In order to further minimise the watch's overall weight, some manufacturers even use titanium for the bezel.
For dive watches, the bezel is a crucial component that needs to be simple to see in a variety of lighting situations. To make it simple to see when submerged, look for large, clear dials and illuminating pointers. To help divers keep track of their bottom time, the majority of contemporary diving timepieces also feature unidirectional spinning bezels.
3. The dial
Every dive watch has a revolving bezel, regardless of whether you're a leisure or professional saturation diver. It is essential for assisting divers in determining the amount of residual oxygen and bottom time.
Usually, the bezel features a luminous zero pointer and a scale that reads either 12 hours or 60 minutes. In order to prevent unintentionally reducing the diving time or lengthening the ascending time, it is also unidirectional, rotating in an anticlockwise way.
Because dive watches are designed to be readable in low light, they should have powerful lume applied to the hands, indexes, and bezel. This lowers the possibility of a dangerous error and makes it easier to read the dial in murky water. That's fortunate for you because you'll need to know precisely how long your dive will last and when to surface.
4. Strap
Regardless of your level of experience—recreational or professional saturation diving—you are well-versed in bottom time, or the duration of time spent underwater. This is why having a dive watch bezel that can be used to calculate your elapsed dive time is useful.
Many of these timepieces are made to be as readable as possible, especially in dimly lit areas. In order to assist avoid misreading the dial due to light loss, their hands and indications are frequently coated with luminosity.
The dive watch is a well-liked and classic option because of these characteristics as well as the durability of a rubber or stainless steel bracelet. This is a watch that looks well on the street and in the water, and it goes well with any kind of attire.
5. Motion
Dive watches are strong, durable objects that can tolerate high pressure. Additionally, they are made to be readable in dim or nonexistent light. Numerous have glowing symbols on the bezel, hands, and dial. The bezel of diving watches is unidirectional, in contrast to conventional watches. The diver can now precisely track elapsed time thanks to this. The ratchet stops the bezel from rotating clockwise in the event that it moves unintentionally during the dive. In order to keep out water, dust, and other debris, O-rings are typically installed where the crystal and crown stem meet in dive watches. This guarantees the integrity of the hermetic seal, preserving precise watch operation even in harsh circumstances. Additionally, helium escape valves for mixed-gas diving are found in several of them. By continuously innovating these extremely specific timepieces, watchmakers enable us to explore greater ocean depths than ever possible.
