Omega Very Subtly Updates One Of Their Best Looking Watches; Casio Solves An Obscure Problem; ZRC Does Their Unusual Grands Fonds MN64 in Titanium; Panerai Wraps The Luminor Marina In Carbotech

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. How cool is that ZRC? I’m not sure I would ever wear one, but how cool is it?!

In this issue

• Omega Very Subtly Updates One Of Their Best Looking Watches, The Moonshine Gold And Green Speedmaster

• This Casio Gravitymaster Solves a Problem You Didn't Know Your Analog Watch Had

• ZRC Refreshes Their Very Unusual Grands Fonds MN64 in Titanium

• Panerai Wraps The Basic Luminor Marina PAM01707 In Very Cool Carbotech

👂What’s new

1/

Omega Very Subtly Updates One Of Their Best Looking Watches, The Moonshine Gold And Green Speedmaster

Omega has a habit of releasing a watch and then, a while later, releasing the same watch with one thing changed. And then they don’t tell anyone they updated the watch This is exactly what’s happening here. The green-dial gold Speedmaster already existed, and it was one of the best looking Speedmasters you could get; now it exists with gold sub-dials instead of green ones. A small change, but look at how cool those sub-dials are.

The case is exactly the same as the previous version, which means 42mm wide and 13.18mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 47.46mm, all of it in Omega's Moonshine Gold, the brand's own yellow gold alloy tuned to resist fading. A domed sapphire crystal sits up front and a sapphire caseback shows the movement. Water resistance is 50 meters, which is fine for what this is. I’d be more concerned about a hunk of gold on your wrist dragging you to the bottom of the pool.

The dial is green with a sunburst finish and a deep, deep green color, applied gold markers, applied Omega logo, and familiar gold hands. The bezel is polished green ceramic with a Ceragold tachymeter scale and the dot over 90. The change is the three sub-dials, now finished in Moonshine Gold rather than matching the dial and Omega has textured them with an azurage pattern it says was inspired by the spikes on golf shoes. Make of that what you will.

Inside is the Co-Axial Master Chronometer calibre 3861, hand-wound, METAS-certified, beating at 3Hz with roughly 50 hours of power reserve. It's the same movement that powers the rest of the current Moonwatch line so you know it’s good. The bracelet is Moonshine Gold with a folding clasp.

The Speedmaster Moonwatch Professional in Moonshine Gold (Ref. 310.60.42.50.10.002) is available now, priced at €51,600. See more on the Omega website.

2/

This Casio Gravitymaster Solves a Problem You Didn't Know Your Analog Watch Had

While reading about the new Casio G-Shock GRAVITYMASTER GWR-B3000, I learned that every analog (quartz) watch has a built in flaw. I mean, the flaw is obvious, I just never thought about it before. Motor-driven hands can slip off their reference points after a hard knock, leaving the watch to show the wrong time while its internal clock keeps perfect time underneath. Casio has spent years fighting this with correction routines that run on a fixed schedule, realigning the hands every so often whether or not the watch was ever hit. The new Gravitymaster takes a more proactive role. It watches for the impact itself and snaps the hands back the moment they move.

The snapping of the hands is cool, but don’t sleep on this case. Casio calls it a dual hollow structure: a carbon fiber-reinforced inner case sits inside an outer shell of stainless steel protectors formed by metal injection molding, with visible resin shock absorbers between the two layers. The center case is held at four points and looks like it floats, a shape Casio arrived at through topology optimization and stress simulation. At 56.7mm by 47.3mm it’s enormous, but at 102 grams it should wear super light. Sapphire crystal on top, 200 meters of water resistance, and a bezel swaps the usual G-Shock logo for engraved world-time city codes.

The GWR-B3000 comes in two dials, one blue and one grey, and both are low-reflection and built for reading rather than admiring. The layout is the same across both: an in-dial solar cell, a flight log, and the dual-time UTC display.

Inside is the second-generation Tough Movement, the Tough MVT.2. It adds two functions aimed straight at hand drift. Auto hand home position correction now pairs with shock detection, so a strong impact triggers immediate realignment instead of waiting for the next scheduled check. A magnetic field sensor deals with the other common culprit, pausing the hands when it detects a strong field and returning them once you’re clear of it. How cool is that?

Through the Smartphone Link app you get automatic time adjustment four times a day, simplified setting, and world time reaching roughly 300 cities plus any other location you care to set. The watch also has a freaking flight log function: a button press records the date, time, and position onto a map in the app, with a grouping function that batches multiple flights for easier management. There's a phone finder too.

The new G-Shock GRAVITYMASTER GWR-B3000 is available now, priced at $880. See more on the Casio website.

3/

ZRC Refreshes Their Very Unusual Grands Fonds MN64 in Titanium

I think this one also came out a while ago, but it’s never too late to write about a strange diver from ZRC. ZRC has been making dive watches since the late 1950s, when the French Navy contracted the brand to build the original Grands Fonds. But this is not just another dive watch built for the military, as it’s full of interesting quirks. For example, look at that crown at 6 o’clock. The case has a chunky, angular look, and it looks like it could survive a nuclear blast, let alone a dive. The modern ZRC is recreating these watches with a lot of gusto, and now they’re releasing the MN64 Titanium.

The case measures 41.5mm wide, but you need more numbers to tell the whole story of the watch. Unfortunately, we don’t get those numbers, which is a shame. What must be the case is that this should wear well with grade 5 titanium construction. While the material changes, the angular geometry stays, as does the ECS bezel, which flushes water through the mechanism to keep salt from gumming it up. The submarine-hatch caseback distributes pressure across the back rather than concentrating it, and the Crown Protection System (CPS) locks the watch out of use unless the crown is screwed all the way down. Now, this is obviously a chunky watch so you know that water resistance will be good. 300 meters, surely. Maybe 500? Hell, it could even be 1,000 meters. It sure could. But it’s not. Water resistance is rated to 3,000 meters and tested past 5,000 meters. Impressive

Two dials are available. The Full Titanium gets a sunray black face with applied markers and a date window, restrained and nearly monochrome. The Titanium Rubber version has a blue-to-black gradient with SLN 3D Lumicast indices. Both use applied metal indices and heavily lumed hands.

Inside is the Sellita SW300-1 in Elaboré grade, beating at 4Hz, with a 56-hour power reserve and regulated to around +/-5 seconds per day. The Full Titanium comes on a ladder-style titanium bracelet; the Titanium Rubber gets a yellow FKM strap.

The ZRC MN64 Titanium is available now, with the Full Titanium priced at CHF 4,690, and the rubber version at CHF 4,090. See more on the ZRC website.

4/

Panerai Wraps The Basic Luminor Marina PAM01707 In Very Cool Carbotech

Panerai's Carbotech has been around long enough now that it's no longer a novelty, but the material still puts a smile on my face whenever I see it used. I’ve always had a distain for carbon fiber, especially on cars, because it always looked cheap. It felt like plastic, and with the usual glossy finishes of the time, I felt like it could have easily been just a sticker. I’ve since changed my mind on carbon, but not on cars. That’s still tacky. I have, however, started liking carbon on watches. And Carbotech, while not pure carbon fiber you might find in other applications, is a material I like a lot. Panerai has been using it on their more complicated and expensive watches, but now it comes to the classic Luminor Marina model. This is the new PAM01707.

The case measures 44mm wide and 14.5mm thick. That case, as well as the bezel and crown protector are all made out of Carbotech, Panerai's own composite made by compressing carbon fibre layers with PEEK polymer. The layered construction means every case comes out with its own marbled pattern across the matte-black surface, so no two are quite identical. On top is a sapphire crystal, the titanium screw-down caseback is DLC coated and water resistance is 300 meters.

The dial keeps things pretty simple. The base is a matte black surface, a sandwich construction, with warm beige Super-LumiNova that glows green underneath and shown through the indicator cutouts, and no date. Small seconds sit at 9 o'clock. The thin pencil-style hands are done in black with beige lume inserts.

Inside is the automatic calibre P.9010, built at Richemont's ValFleurier facility, beating at 4Hz, with a three-day power reserve from twin barrels. It has an independently adjustable local hour hand that jumps in one-hour increments without stopping the movement, which makes it a practical travel watch. It comes on a brown vintage-style calf strap with beige stitching, plus a black rubber strap in the box.

The new Panerai Luminor Marina PAM01707 is available now, priced at €15,200. See more on the Panerai website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• By no fault of my own, I just realized that The Odyssey just might be the cultural event that I read most about this year. I’m not sure I wanted to, but here we are. And if I have to suffer, so do you. But I can’t lie, there’s been quite a lot of good writing about the movie. So, let’s do all three today about The Odyssey. Starting with an essay of exactly what I just mentioned — how The Odyssey discourse has dominated this summer.

• Then we have Ezra Klein from the NYT on how The Odyssey is the political movie of the decade, with its greatest trick being trojan-horsing Judeo-Christian norms into Greek myths.

• Last, the Guardian again on how the right hates The Odyssey because of its ‘wokeness’ – but it missed an even bigger threat to its worldview.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

The internet’s favorite Japanese color book was made by Sanzo Wada, a runaway painter who shaped how Japan uses color and became the first Japanese person to win an Oscar. Almost everything he made disappeared, and then came back. This is his story.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk