Orient Fixes The Biggest Bambino Problem; And New Watches From Omega, Mido, Panerai And MB&F

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. I dismissed the Omega release when I saw it as not that interesting. But the more I look at the brown ceramic case, the more attractive it is to me. Weirdo, I know.

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1/ Orient Fixes The Biggest Problem With The Bambino And Releases It In 36 With No Date

For more than a decade, the Bambino has been the usual answer when someone asks for a cheap automatic dress watch. It has a domed crystal, a mid-century dial and an in-house movement, all for a few hundred dollars. Size has always been its biggest problem. Most Bambinos sit around 40mm, some go past 41mm, and a design taken from 1950s dress watches doesn’t really work at that diameter. A 38mm version helped. And while Orient in 2019 released a 36.4mm Bambino, officially called the Classic Date, that thing had a date and you really don't need a date on the Bambino. Well, now, Orient released a 36mm Bambino with no date and this is the best. Now we just need more dial colors.

The steel case is 36.4mm wide, 12.3mm thick and has a lug-to-lug of 42.2mm. The sides are brushed, the bezel is polished, and the domed mineral crystal sits on top. There’s an exhibition caseback, and water resistance is 30 meters. At 12.3mm it’s borderline too tall for its diameter, but most of that height comes from the crystal. That’s part of the Bambino, and always has been. The lug-to-lug matters more, and 42.2mm will fit a hell of a lot of wrists.

You get four dials. The classic cream dial with blue hands is ref. RA-BB0104Y. Then there’s a plain white (RA-BB0103S), a green with silver hands (RA-BB0102E), and a silver dial in a gold-tone plated case (RA-BB0101S). All of them have applied baton markers and dauphine-style hands.

Inside is Orient’s in-house calibre F6524, an automatic running at 3Hz with 22 jewels and about 40 hours of power reserve. It hacks and hand-winds. The strap is 18mm wide leather with a crocodile-embossed texture and a steel pin buckle. It’s black on the white dial and brown on the other three. The old 36mm used an awkward 17mm strap, so the move to 18mm makes replacements easy to find.

The Orient Bambino 36mm has a retail price of $410, but Orient Watch USA is currently selling it for $305 as a launch promotion. In the UK it’s £319.99 in steel and £339.99 in gold-tone. See more photos here and the watches on the Orient website.

2/ Omega Quietly Updates The Seamaster Diver 300M With Blue and Brown Ceramic Cases

Most Omega fans want a proper redesign of the Seamaster Diver 300M, like the one the Planet Ocean recently got. But instead, Omega gives us something that not many people have asked for. But at least it's neat. Very quietly and without a real announcement, Omega released two new versions of the Seamaster Diver 300M, with ceramic cases in two very nice colors – blue and brown.

Both cases are ceramic, 43.5mm wide and 14.27mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 51.5mm and 21mm between the lugs. You get 300 meters of water resistance, a screw-down crown and a domed sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating on both sides. On the blue model, the bezel, crowns and caseback are Grade 5 titanium. The brown model uses Sedna Gold, Omega’s 18K rose gold alloy, for the bezel and crowns, and ceramic for the caseback. The blue watch weighs about 106g and the brown about 122g.

The dials are ceramic too, in the same color as the case, with the current large-wave pattern. On the blue model, the bezel scale is filled with white enamel, the skeletonized hands have a titanium-colored PVD finish with white Super-LumiNova, and every printed marking is white. On the brown model, the bezel scale is Ceragold, the hands are solid Sedna Gold, and the markings combine white and gold.

Inside both is the Omega calibre 8806, an automatic Co-Axial movement with METAS Master Chronometer certification. It resists magnetic fields up to 15,000 gauss, uses a silicon hairspring and a free-sprung balance, and runs at 3.5Hz with 55 hours of power reserve. You can see it through the sapphire caseback, decorated with Geneva waves, and a rhodium-plated rotor. Each watch comes on a fitted rubber strap in its case color. The blue one has a titanium pin buckle and the brown one has a brown ceramic buckle.

The new Omega Seamaster Diver 300M models are part of the regular collection and the one in blue ceramic and titanium (ref. 210.92.44.20.03.001) is priced at €9,700, while the brown ceramic and Sedna Gold version (ref. 210.62.44.20.13.001) is priced at €15,000. See more photos here and the watches on the Omega website.

3/ MIDO Puts the Multifort TV Big Date in Black PVD With a Bronze Gradient Dial

This one came out a few weeks ago and I missed it, but it’s worth catching up on. MIDO has released a Special Edition of the Multifort TV Big Date with a black PVD case and a dial that fades from black at the rim to bronze in the centre. The Multifort TV Big Date launched in 2023 and brought back the cushion-shaped case of the 1973 Multi-Star, named for its resemblance to an old television screen.

The case is stainless steel with a black PVD over a mix of satin and polished surfaces. It is 40mm wide and 39.2mm tall, with a lug-to-lug of 46.85mm. The sapphire crystal is AR-coated inside and out. The crown screws down, water resistance is 100 meters, and the display caseback has an engraved serial number.

Horizontal brushing runs across the dial, and the colour shifts from black at the perimeter to bronze at the middle. The big date window sits at the top of the dial and is large enough to read at a glance without crowding anything. The hour and minute hands are faceted and diamond-cut, and they are filled with Super-LumiNova, just like the applied indices. The seconds hand is flat, and a minute track runs around the flange.

Inside is the MIDO calibre 80, an automatic based on the ETA C07.651. It runs at 3Hz and has 80 hours of reserve. It has 25 jewels, a Nivachron hairspring for magnetic and shock resistance, and regulation in three positions. You can see the rotor through the back. It is decorated with Côtes de Genève and the MIDO logo. Two straps come in the box: light brown leather with a patina finish and black stitching, plus black textile with a brown stripe down the middle. Both use quick-release bars and have black PVD pin buckles.

The MIDO Multifort TV Big Date Special Edition, ref. M049.526.36.081.00, is priced at CHF 1,260. See more photos here and the watch on the MIDO website.

4/ Panerai Gives the Submersible Marina Militare a Black Ceramic Bezel in Destro and GMT Versions

Panerai’s two new Marina Militare Submersibles look identical from across the room, but they're quite different watches. The new PAM01757 is a 44mm Destro with the crown on the left. The PAM01758 is a 42mm GMT. If the Submersible is new to you, it’s the Luminor case with a one-way diving bezel added, a line Panerai started in 1998.

Both watches use Panerai’s cushion case in brushed stainless steel, with a sapphire crystal on top, a solid caseback and 500 meters of water resistance. The Destro is 44mm wide and 13.94mm thick. Its crown and locking lever bridge sit at 9 o’clock, which is supposed to be made for left-handers who wear a watch on the right wrist. Right-handers like myself benefit too, because nothing presses into the back of your left hand. The GMT is 42mm wide and 14.38mm thick, so it’s a little taller but smaller overall. Both bezels have a matte black ceramic insert with a raised dive scale and a lume pip.

The dials are matte black with a grained texture and applied indices. The hands, markers and bezel pip all use beige Super-LumiNova. Each dial has a recessed small seconds subdial. On the GMT variant the small seconds is at 9 o'clock, but on the Destro, which has the crown on the left, the small seconds is at 3 o'clock, since the movement is flipped. The GMT also has a date window with bevelled edges at 3, a 24-hour scale on an angled flange, and a fourth hand with a beige and orange arrow tip. It’s a caller-style GMT, so you set the 24-hour hand on its own while the local hour stays put. The beige lume gives both watches a vintage tint. You know by now how I feel about that.

The Destro uses the automatic calibre P.980, made at ValFleurier and also used in the recent Luminor 42. It beats at 4Hz and has 72 hours of power reserve. The GMT uses the calibre P.900/GMT24H, also beating at 4Hz with a three-day reserve. Both casebacks are engraved with the Siluro a Lenta Corsa, the Italian Navy’s manned torpedo, which sailors nicknamed the Maiale. Each watch comes on a gold-brown Ponte Vecchio vintage leather strap with a brushed steel trapezoid pin buckle, plus a black rubber strap with an accordion pattern. The Destro’s strap tapers from 24mm to 22mm, and the GMT’s tapers from 22mm to 20mm.

The Panerai Submersible Marina Militare Destro PAM01757 is priced at €12,300, and the Submersible Marina Militare GMT PAM01758 at €12,700. Neither is a limited edition, but they are numbered. Both casebacks read “Annual Production,” which means Panerai caps how many it makes each year. See more pictures here and the watches on the Panerai website, the Destro here and the GMT here.

5/ MB&F Fills The Platinum LM101 With Cloisonné Enamel Jungles In Blue, Red And Green

MB&F’s Legacy Machines take 19th-century pocket watch ideas and rebuild them in three dimensions, with the balance lifted above the dial where you can watch it beat away. The LM101 came out in 2014 as the smallest and simplest of them, a 40mm watch with time, power reserve and that suspended balance. It’s a crowded surface for an artist to do their work, and MB&F has tried this before with Eddy Jaquet’s hand-engraved Jules Verne scenes on the LM Split Escapement. Now, however, MB&F has cleaned up the entire surface of anything superfluous to allow for a cleaner canvas. That's why we get three LM101 editions with cloisonné enamel dials done by Gabriel Colliard: a blue one with a monkey, a red one with two macaws and a green one with a crocodile. Colliard studied fine art in Argentina, trained as an enameller in Limoges and worked at Patek Philippe before going independent, and MB&F let him choose the subjects.

The case is made out of platinum, 40mm wide and 16.5mm thick, with the crown at 4 o’clock. That's a seriously thick watch, yes, but a lot of that is the heavily domed sapphire crystal on top that extends far from the case to make room for the balance. There's also a sapphire crystal out back. Water resistance is 30 meters, but you really don't need more.

The case is impressive, but the dials. Oh, wow, those dials. Colliard bends gold wire by hand to draw each scene, then fills the cells with enamel and fires them, over and over, until the color has depth. His first sketches used a wide palette, in the style of 1950s cloisonné. MB&F asked for one main color per dial, which makes the job harder because tone and transparency have to separate the elements instead of contrasting colors. MB&F also thinned the dial plate so it could hold more layers of enamel, and it removed the two raised sub-dials and fitted longer hands. The time is still indicated at 2 o’clock with the power reserve gauge at 6, but now the painting runs underneath them. The balance still hangs over the scene between 9 and 11 o’clock. Colliard finishes about one dial a month, so all 24 will take more than two years, and no two will be identical.

The movement is MB&F’s own hand-wound calibre, with 231 parts and 23 jewels, running at 2.5Hz. Power reserve is now 60 hours, up from 45, and the 14mm balance carries a Straumann double hairspring. Kari Voutilainen was tasked with decorating the movement, and he set the finishing to old pocket watch standards: Geneva waves, polished bevels, gold chatons and countersunk blued screws. Colliard also enamelled the ratchet wheel on the back to match the front. It comes on a strap in brown alligator with a steel deployant capped in white gold.

The MB&F LM101 Gabriel Colliard is limited to 8 watches per color and it's priced at €107,000, without taxes. See more photos here and the watches on the MB&F website.

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