You know that kid who was really cool at school yet somehow got straight A stars.
He was one of those guys who could pull all the girls and pull off a leather jacket. He was lead singer in the band and played fly-half for the 1st XV. Yet somehow he managed to ace calculus, too.
Tudor is that kid.
With the new Black Bay Ceramic, Tudor has made one of its coolest watches yet. That matte black ceramic finish; the black sunray dial; the black hybrid leather and rubber strap – it’s just cool. In the same way a ninja is cool. Or Batman’s car. There’s no denying it.
Yet, underneath this stealth interior resides the school swat.
You see, Tudor wanted to impress the teaching fraternity so much, it invited them to stay.
We’re talking Metas – AKA the Swiss Federal Institute of Metrology. It’s an independent national metrology organisation, which is technically part of the Swiss Federal Department of Justice and Police.
It’s responsible for the most demanding testing in the watch industry that covers precision, resistance to magnetic fields, waterproofness and power reserve.
So when it certifies a watch, it’s really something special. In fact, only one other manufacturer – Omega – has managed it in the past. (And will charge you considerably more for the privilege.)
Tudor was so determined to achieve this milestone, it set up a Metas testing facility at its HQ where the examiners are now based two weeks of every four.
The resulting Black Bay Ceramic is a master chronometer that can function within a five-second range of variation every day. That’s a whole fives seconds better than the more well known COSC range of -4 +6. And crucially Metas only allows you to gain time (+5 seconds), so with this Tudor, you’ll never be late.
The anti-magnetism is off the chart, too. Well, not quite – it’s up to 15,000 Gauss. But to put that in context, an MRI is 13,000 Gauss, so there’s no way your mobile phone battery is going to have any effect on your watch’s ability to tell the time.
What’s perhaps even more impressive about this is that there’s no Faraday cage to help in this regard – the crystal case back proves that. Instead, there’s some material magic at play – R&D so secretive that we could tell you but then we’d have to kill you.
Needless to say, Tudor’s Calibre MT5602-1U is a masterpiece. (The ‘U’, by the way, doesn’t actually stand for anything – it’s a playful nod to the shape of a traditional magnet.)
Like its Black Bay stablemates, the power reserve is 70 hours and it’s waterproof to 200m.
Oh, and did we mention it looks cool. Really damn cool.
£3,550, tudorwatch.com
