The Flagship Tudor Dive Watch Now Comes in Black Ceramic

The deluge of cool shit from Tudor continues. This time it’s everybody’s favorite Black Bay dive watch, but in black ceramic. It’s stealthy. It’s sexy. And…it’s METAS-certified.

This is the first METAS-Certified Tudor watch

Wait, you might be asking yourself, what does that even mean? Sit back and let me tell you. See, METAS (the Federal Institute of Metrology) administers a Chronometer certification test for accuracy in watchmaking. To pass, a watch must maintain certain levels of precision, resistance to magnetism, waterproofness, and power reserve, including accuracy to within a five-second range per day.

Tudor

For comparative purposes (or “comparative porpoises,” which is what I almost typed, and which is, I guess, two dolphins trying to one-up one another), the COSC (Swiss Official Chronometer Testing Institute) accuracy standard for Chronometers that we all know and love to quote is -4 to +6 seconds per day carried out on a single movement. Tudor’s internal standard for its manufacture calibers is even better, at -2 to +4 seconds per day, and its movements are Chronometer-certified anyway.

So what does this effectively mean? Well, as the kids might have said when I was a kid, the new Tudor Black Bay ceramic is, like, hella accurate and robust.

The watch can resist magnetic field of up to 15,000 gauss (which is really just a ton of gauss) and its waterproofing standard conforms to ISO’s standards. It’s been tested in six positions at two temperatures, and at two different levels of power reserve. The automatic, in-house Tudor cal. MT5602-1U — executed in all-black with an openworked rotor — has a 70-hour power reserve, and the case is water resistant to 200m.

Okay, great, whoop-dee-doo. Now what about the cool part — the fact that the watch is made of black ceramic?

Tudor

It’s Made of Freakin’ Black Ceramic

Well, as we said, the watch is made of black ceramic, a high-tech material that’s thoroughly modern and lends the watch an awesome, tactical look. It features a matte, black monobloc (single-piece) case with sand-blasted surfaces as well as bevelled edges in a mirror-polished finish — the old Rolex/Tudor trademark.

The bezel insert is also black ceramic with a satin finish and matte-finished gradations. Of course, the dial itself is black, executed here with applied dot-dash hour markers and signature “snowflake” hands in an off-white, vaguely vintage-inspired color. (And thankfully — as otherwise it might be pretty tough to read the time on the damn thing.)

The whole thing is finished off with a black, hybrid leather/rubber strap, as well as an additional black fabric strap with a cream band.

It’s Still a Fully Capable Tudor Dive Watch

Other than that, you’re largely getting all the standard Black Bay goodness — a 41mm case, a domed sapphire crystal, “snowflake” hands inspired by vintage Submariners from the late 1960s, Super-LumiNova lume, and a five-year, transferable warranty with no registration or periodic maintenance checks required.

All this will cost you $4,725 — a typically approachable Tudor price considering all the technology, know-how, aesthetic consideration and Rolex-inspired finesse present in the watch.

It’s important to note that this model is a standard Black Bay — not the Black Bay Fifty-Eight, which is Tudor’s 39mm, slightly more vintage-inspired model. That collection received both sterling silver and all-gold models earlier in the year during the Watches & Wonders Geneva trade show. The addition of a stealthy black model in the slightly larger Black Bay line, however, should serve as a welcome addition to Tudor’s growing portfolio. And who knows — maybe the brand will consider one for the smaller Fifty-Eight line somewhere down the road.

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