Orient Kamasu GMT Is A Really Nice Affordable Travel Diver; And New Watches From Sinn, Louis Errard, Pequignet And Lange

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1/ The New Orient Kamasu GMT Is One Hell Of An Affordable Diver Made For Travel

Cheap GMTs tend to be desk divers with 100 meters of water resistance and a bezel for show. The Kamasu GMT, however, goes a bit harder, with a water resistance rating to 200 meters, which makes it one of the few under $500 you could actually dive with. The Kamasu is Orient’s mid-priced steel diver, around since 2019, and this is the first version with a second time zone. Is a GMT diver the perfect everyday watch? This one might be, if you have the wrist for it.

The steel case measures 42.8mm wide, a millimeter up on the regular Kamasu, and 13.4mm thick. That sounds like a lot, and it is a lot. Add to that the 49.5mm lug-to-lug and the size disqualifies it from being a perfect daily watch. But it's pretty close. On top is a sapphire crystal, which is more than you get in a similar watch from a competitor. You still get the crown guards, which are the same as on the regular Kamasu, and the crown screws down to give you 200 meters of water resistance.

Very little on the dial has changed, which is just fine. You still get a sunburst finish, applied geometric markers, arrow-tipped hour and seconds hands and a sword minute hand. The new GMT hand also ends in an arrow and changes color by reference: red on the black, green and blue dials, gold on the orange, and blue on the limited dark blue edition. The old day-date window is gone, replaced by a framed date at three o’clock, and the minute track now sits on the rehaut.

Inside is the calibre F6P22, an in-house automatic built from Orient’s F6922. It beats at 3Hz, has 22 jewels and stores 40 hours of power. This is a caller style GMT, so the GMT hand is the one you set on its own while the local hour hand stays fixed to the minutes. For keeping an eye on a time zone away, that's a perfect solution. If you cross time zones a lot, resetting local time on arrival takes longer than on a flyer GMT. Turns out, I was way too quick looking this over and I got a bit ahead of myself. Sorry for that. This is not a GMT movement at all. It's just a 24 hour hand with a GMT bezel, with no way to independently adjust any of the hands. I wasn't expecting a watch named GMT in 2026 to not actually use just a 24 hour hand. That's not good. Not good at all. The three-link steel bracelet has Oyster-style Y-shaped links, hollow end links and a folding safety clasp.

The Orient Kamasu GMT is available now for $495. Black, green, blue and orange are regular production; the dark blue version is limited to 4,300 pieces. See more photos here and the watches on the Orient website.

2/ Sinn Celebrates 65 Years With a Revival Of A Chronograph That Went To Space By Accident

The Sinn 140 S went to space by accident. Reinhard Furrer wore his personal one on the 1985 D1 Spacelab flight, outside any official programme, and came back with proof that an automatic chronograph works fine without gravity. Sinn is now marking its 65th anniversary with a recreation of that watch, with a very cool utilitarian look. This is the new 140 A S Anniversary.

The case is 44mm wide and 15.5mm thick, made out of steel with Sinn’s Black Hard Coating over its TEGIMENT surface hardening, finished with a mix of brushed and polished surfaces. It’s large and tall, but this is a Sinn. It has every right to be. Everything else is standard Sinn overbuilding: D3-System crown and pushers, Ar-Dehumidifying Technology to stop the crystal fogging, low-pressure resistance, and 100 meters of water resistance. The sapphire crystal is AR-coated on both sides and the caseback screws down. This anniversary edition gets polished bevels in addition to the matte black rest of the watch.

The dial is matte black with lumed indices and lumed hour and minute hands. Both chronograph hands, one for the seconds and one for the minutes, are lumed too, which is rare and genuinely useful. The minute track runs all the way around the edge to give the central counter something to point at, and an inner pilot’s bezel with a lumed marker lets you time something without starting the chronograph. Small seconds and a date complete it

The SZ01 is Sinn’s modification of the Valjoux 7750, reworked to drive the central jumping minute hand. It’s automatic, beats at 4Hz, has 28 jewels and hacking seconds, and is antimagnetic to DIN 8309. The anniversary box includes a black-and-yellow leather strap, a solid steel bracelet with fine adjustment, a strap-changing tool and spare spring bars.

The 140 A S Anniversary is available now, limited to 300 pieces and priced at €5,490. See more photos here and the watch on the Sinn website.

3/ Louis Erard Continues Dia De Los Muertos Tradition With A Black Case And Colorful Skull

October is skull watch season. Brands time these releases for Halloween and Day of the Dead, and the memento mori skull has become a reliable test bed for dial techniques. Louis Erard’s entry this year is the Dia De Los Muertos Black, a limited edition of 10 with a large painted skull on an all-black watch.

The case is stainless steel, sandblasted and coated in black PVD, and measures 42mm wide. Not small, by any means. It gives the skull room to take over the dial, which is what you want here, but 42mm will rule this watch out for plenty of wrists. Water resistance is 50 meters.

The dial is wonderful. It has a fully black base with an embossed flower pattern that almost disappears into the black since it has no color. But then you have the skull applique, which is painted vividly with six colors, but with white, gray, orange and yellow dominating the look. The floral pattern is also recessed into the skull, so up close it should have real depth. The logo is worked into the top of the skull at 12 o’clock and the brand name runs across the teeth at 6, which is some pretty good integration. The hands are pear-shaped and anthracite plated.

Inside is the Sellita SW261 automatic, beating at 4Hz with 38 hours of power reserve. It comes on a black leather strap with tone-on-tone stitching and quick-release spring bars.

The Louis Erard Dia De Los Muertos Black is limited to 10 pieces and priced at CHF 3,490. See more photos here and the watch on the Louis Erard website.

4/ Pequignet Adds a Dance-Music Tempo Scale to the Royale Paris Chrono BPM

Pequignet released its first chronograph earlier this year, and it was only a matter of very short time before we started getting variants on the theme. This new one, the Royale Paris Chrono BPM, isn't just a new colorway. It's inspired by the French Touch, the 1990s French house scene that produced Daft Punk. Start the chronograph, count 30 bass drum kicks, and the seconds hand will indicate the track’s tempo. It works exactly like a pulsometer, only for music. It’s a gimmick, and a likeable one.

The steel case is 39.5mm wide and 12.7mm thick, a good size for a chronograph. The flanks are recessed, with brushed surfaces and polished bevels, and the lugs are separate and then fixed to the case. Round piston pushers are on the side, next to a push-pull crown. You get a domed sapphire crystal on top, a sapphire window in the screw-down caseback, and 50 meters of water resistance.

The dial fades from electric blue at the top to black at the bottom. The BPM scale runs around the edge in turquoise on black, covering tempos between 35 and 180, with printed equalizer bars between 12 and two o’clock. A smooth recessed ring separates the scale from the center, and faceted indices sit across it. The sub-dials are snailed as a nod to vinyl, with seconds at three and a 30-minute register at nine. Lume is limited to the two main hands.

Despite the Royale name, this isn’t the Calibre Royal. Inside is the Calibre Initial, Pequignet’s fifth movement, with a cam-operated chronograph module from Dubois-Depraz on top. The base is 4.2mm thick, runs at 4Hz and has 65 hours of power reserve. It comes on a black Cordura strap with a steel pin buckle.

The Pequignet Royale Paris Chrono BPM (ref. 9120343) is part of the regular collection, available now, priced at €6,950. See more photos here and the watch on the Pequignet website.

5/ A. Lange & Söhne Puts a Platinum Bracelet Back on the Datograph Perpetual

The Datograph is Lange’s hand-wound flyback chronograph, launched in 1999 and still the watch most people point to when explaining why they love the brand so much. For its first generation, up to 2012, you could order one on a platinum bracelet, and almost nobody did. Wellendorff, the German jeweller, made those bracelets for Lange, they added a small fortune to an already expensive watch, and the few that exist now sell for absurd sums; Loupe This sold one for $116,000. Lange now has a new platinum bracelet of its own design, and it debuts on a limited Datograph Perpetual, the version that adds a perpetual calendar, with a black dial and diamond hour markers.

The case is 950 platinum, 41mm wide and 13.5mm thick, matching the white gold Datograph Perpetual in the regular collection. The finishing is part brushed, part polished, with sapphire crystals front and back. Lange only calls it splash resistant, which is standard for the brand.

The dial is solid silver finished in gloss black, with rhodium-plated subdials. Eleven baguette diamonds, about 0.13 carats in total, are used as hour markers, except for the four and eight positions. The layout is unchanged since the model launched in 2006: big date at the top, a 30-minute counter with month and leap year at three, small seconds with day and day/night at nine, plus a moon phase. The main hands are white gold, the central chronograph hand is rhodium-plated steel, and the sub-dial hands are blued steel.

Inside is the hand-wound calibre L952.1, the first-generation Datograph’s L951.1 with its own perpetual calendar module. It has 556 parts and 45 jewels, a column wheel, a horizontal clutch and flyback, and beats at 2.5Hz with 36 hours of power reserve. The short reserve is the cost of building on the older base instead of the one used in the Up/Down models. Finishing includes German silver plates and bridges, ribbing, polished edges and blued screws. The bracelet has five rows of 950 platinum links, polished ones alternating with brushed, and wide polished bevels along the sides.

The A. Lange & Söhne Datograph Perpetual ref. 410.136E is limited to 50 pieces and price is on request. There's no way this is under a quarter of a million euros. See more photos here and the watch on the A. Lange & Söhne website.

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