The ‘Oscars of Watches’ Just Named This Diver the Best Sports Watch of 2024

The innovative dive watch is one of the most affordable watches to win an award at this year’s GPHG.

a closeup of the crowns on a ming dive watch

Published November 13, 2024

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Updated November 14, 2024

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Film has the Oscars; television has the Emmys, music has the Grammys, and watches? They have the Grand Prix D’Horlogerie De Genève, better known as the GPHG or, colloquially, the “Oscars of Watches.”

The annual awards handed out in Geneva honor the most impressive and significant new watches released over the past year, and this year’s winners have just been announced. (View the full list of winners here.)

Most of the categories deal with high horological complications — this year’s “Aiguille d’Or” winner, the show’s top honor, is the IWC Portugieser Eternal Calendar, a $150,000+ perpetual calendar that can accurately track the moon’s phases for 45 million years.

a closeup of an iwc eternal calendar watch — IWC took home the top prize at this year’s “Watch Oscars.”

But a couple of the awards are a bit more interesting to the casual watch enthusiast, namely the “Sports Watch” prize. This year’s winner in that category is the MING 37.09 Bluefin, a dive watch that retails for a little over $5,000, making it one of the ceremony’s most affordable honorees.

It’s the second time the Malaysian brand has won a GPHG, with the brand turning heads just two years after its founding by winning the “Horological Revelation” prize in 2019, an award that recognizes outstanding watch brands younger than ten years old.

So what is it about MING’s Bluefin diver that allowed it to beat out fellow nominees from Tudor, Zenith, IWC, Parmigiani Fleurier and Singer Reimagined to be crowned the best sports watch of 2024? Read on to find out.

a ming dive watch on a mans wrist — MING’s unique dive watch nabbed the brand its second prestigious GPHG award in five years.

Why rotate the bezel when you can rotate the dial?

I’ve seen hundreds of dive watches, and most follow the same basic formula. They pretty much all have a bezel, either externally or internally, that rotates to track your elapsed time on a dive. But creating a dive watch with a rotating bezel is so 20th century, so MING reimagined how one could track dive time on a watch with the Bluefin. What the brand came up with is both deceptively simple and highly original.

Building upon the design language of its 37 Series watches, MING’s 37.09 Bluefin features hour indices in a luminous ring made of Hyceram ceramic lume on the underside of the sapphire crystal. The lume is Super-Luminova Grade X1 — the brightest lume available — which also coats the hands in a thicker and more even application than on any other MING.

two ming dive watches seen from the front and back — Instead of rotating a bezel, the second crown on the MING Bluefin rotates the entire sapphire dial.

This lumed floating dial application is hardly new for a MING, as many of the brand’s watches go for this same aesthetic. But on the Bluefin, moving the indices off of the dial actually serves a practical purpose.

The dial is a disc of sapphire with a minute track printed in Super-Luminova Grade X1. Instead of rotating the bezel, turning the crown at 4 o’clock rotates the entire dial on a 60-click unidirectional mechanism, giving divers a new way to react with their watch. The crown is both luminous and sealed and can be operated underwater without compromising the watch’s 600m water resistance rating.

In addition to its neat rotating trick, the sapphire dial has also been treated with a deep-blue metallization process that increases legibility on the indices and “bezel,” making the watch a breeze to read underwater should anyone actually take this thing diving.

ming dive watch underwater — The Bluefin’s dial undergoes a special metallization process that increases legibility underwater.

Rare Tuna

As mentioned, the watch has an impressive water resistance of 600m. What’s more impressive is that this was accomplished in a 38mm stainless steel case that’s just 12.8mm thick and has a sapphire display caseback. Through the caseback, one can view the custom Sellita SW300 automatic movement. Made just for MING, it features anthracite skeletonized bridges and looks more high-end than your average SW300.

Then there’s the strap, which first appeared on the Bluefin and which MING says took a surprising amount of engineering to get right. It’s the type of curved and fitted FKM rubber strap you’d expect to find on watches costing much more and features MING’s excellent “flying blade” tuck buckle that includes a micro-adjustment feature and internally hides the end of the strap, eliminating the need for a keeper.

a ming dive watch on a rubber strap — MING’s FKM rubber strap, which can now be purchased as a standalone item, first appeared on the Bluefin earlier this year.

The Bluefin is one of the coolest watches MING has ever produced, and now it’s got the hardware to back up that claim. The only downside to the watch is that, like most MINGs, it’s pretty hard to get a hold of.

The Bluefin debuted back in May for just CHF 4,950 (~$5,410), but the brand only produced 500 of them, making this Bluefin quite rare — pun intended. Of course, the watches sold out in a flash, but luckily, that’s not the end of the road for the Bluefin.

Unlike most MING watches, the Bluefin is going to be an annual release from the brand. That means that another batch of Bluefins will be swimming to MING’s online shop in 2025.

If you don’t want to wait that long to get one, you can also try your luck at landing a straggler from this year’s batch. The first deliveries of the watch will take place soon, and if a Bluefin happens to become available for some reason during that process, you may still be able to purchase it. MING has a waitlist for just such an event, and you can sign up for that here.