Well the Deep Blue that I ordered direct from the manufacturer on Wednesday afternoon arrived today!
I've been looking around for a good value diver style watch with decent water resistance and I originally narrowed it down to either a Steinhart Triton 100 Black or a Helson Shark Diver titanium with a black carbon fibre dial.
Initially of those two I was settled for the Steinhart as I already have two titanium watches. However, I read a couple of owner reviews that said the DLC coating on the Steinhart was starting to show and more worrying was that the clasp was actually PVD coated and was particularly prone to marking, not something I really wanted!
I had a brief look around again at the likes of Zenton and Deep Blue and quite liked the look of the Master 2000 GMT Diver and at about £460 delivered it looked like great value too.
I ordered online at about 4PM on Wednesday and Fedex delivered it before 09:00 this morning, not bad from NYC, about the same time it would have taken for a Special Delivery here in the UK.
Luckily for me, for some reason the shipping charge seems to have been entered as the total declared value of $49 and as a gift
The watch is in a very nice Peli type case and surrounded in foam, and the whole watch was well wrapped in thick plastic.
First thing I noticed when I removed the watch from the case was the weight, at around 280g it's a chunky bugger for sure!!
Diameter is 46mm exc. crown and it's 18mm thick!
The overall finish is brushed and is nice and uniform, the 5 link bracelet also has 2 half links in it to get it adjusted just right, for me it was the usual two whole links removed for my 7.5" wrist.
The links are screw type with a typical long barrel and removable screw on the end. A couple of them were tight to take out and I feel the Chinese manufacture here showed through.
The clasp is the typical flip lock affair and has both a divers extension and micro adjuster springbar holes, again, the Chinese build quality here is evident, it's OK, not brilliant. So with a bit of adjusting I've got it sitting nicely, not too tight but enough to keep the bulk of the watch in one place!
The dial is a flat black and the quality of the dial print is excellent. There are a few different variations when it comes to the hands and dial colour, I went for the black dial, orange hands with blue GMT hand. The orange on black is a great, easy to read contrast.
My only slight niggle about the dial is the use of blue for the second time zone on the inner bezel, a little harder to read, however, this is actually helped by the fact that the bezel itself is in 24 hour format and can if required actually produce a 3rd time zone.
The screw down crown is nice and tight and the watch has the usual 3 position crown, 1st to wind, 2nd to adjust the date and GMT hand and of course 3rd to set the time. Now, this is where the difference comes in between the dedicated GMT ETA 2893-2 and this watch's modified ETA 2836-2, on the 2893-2 that I have on my Helson Buccaneer when you set the GMT hand the hand actually flicks between the hours so that it is line with whatever position the main hour hand is, on this 2836-2 the GMT hand moves like a regular hour hand so if you want to get it smack on it's best to set it on the hour which happened to be just on the hour for me!
The second hand has the usual sweep for this movement with just a hint of stutter.
Case back is screw down with all the usual info and an engraved diver. These are numbered editions of 1000 watches. Waterproof to 2000 meters.
The dial markers, bezel marks and hands all use Super-LumiNova BGW9 blue lume which is very effective!
So, overall impressions are that, yes, it is excellent value for money, the case is a great shape with nice rounded edges, the bezel has a nice smooth action and it looks different enough to seperate it from the usual 'in the style of...............' dive watches.
You'll know it's on your wrist for sure, but it wears really comfortably for the big whopper that it is!
Stef
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