Six Of The Very Best New Watches That Pair Titanium With High-End Mechanics
With the new year well on its way, there have already been a ton of immensely cool watches being presented. Whether it’s new materials and colours in existing collections, completely new models or even entirely new brands, there’s no shortage of news in 2024. News from mainstream brands, but also from indie watchmakers and everything in between. As we do every week, we take a look at what’s what and group together a series of high-end watches all relying on the lightweight properties of titanium. Although we’ve touched upon this topic in the past, the six watches we’re featuring today all came by in the past couple of months. So with that in mind, here are six more high-end titanium watches for you to consider!Zenith Chronomaster Sport TitaniumThe Zenith Chronomaster Sport already quite lived up to its name, but the Titanium edition takes it up a few more notches. The lightweight chronograph watch still looks amazing but has an almost tone-on-tone light gr

Buying Guide - 5 Brown Watches Launched in 2018
For the past five or six years, we’ve seen a massive parade of blue watches marching across the watch scenario. All brands – really, all of them – had a blue version of an existing watch to show (with or without success). So now that blue has become the new black, it is time for our dear watchmaking brands to come up with something new. And if that’s not entirely established yet, it seems that brown watches could well be the upcoming trend. Here are five of them, launched at Baselworld 2018.Warm, original and a great match with gold, brown remains a very dangerous colour if it is not well dosed. Without jumping into gross comparisons, we all know that brown is not the sexiest colour. Yet, when combined with the right metals and used in soft tones, it can lead to a nice, slightly vintage-inspired piece, as elegant as the classic black or blue options – as the rise of vintage, patinated watches with chocolate dials attests. This year, at Baselworld 2018, som

First Look: The MkII Fulcrum 39, an Accessible Mil-Spec Diver from Pennsylvania
Being a watch enthusiast/collector often requires looking at things with more than a little bit of romance. To make us want to keep acquiring the same tiny combination of metal, gears and springs over and over and over again, a watch must be more than the sum of its parts. Sometimes, that means looking back into the past at a certain watch and a specific time it was worn to add a little bit of that magic to our own lives. Maybe this specific model was worn underwater by James Bond whilst scuffling with SPECTRE over an atomic bomb, and maybe this other one is currently worn by RAF fighter pilots, and maybe this one was actually worn on the Moon! Whatever the flavour, these watches add a powerful bit of romance to what is otherwise a fairly mundane object. The irony being that probably none of the aforementioned adventurers gave so much as a second thought to their watches at the time, but I digress.?A second type of romance that can be had with watches comes through vintage pieces and a

Buying Guide - 5 Watches to Consider for This Summer, from Affordable to High-End
The holiday season is fast approaching and that’s the perfect time of the year to take off your suit… and the dress watch that goes along with it. Summer means seaside, boat rides, cocktails, unexpected jumps in a pool and all kinds of leisure activities. This means sports/dive watches on the wrist and for this reason, here are 5 cool pieces that will follow you from the deck of a boat to that fancy cocktail party in style.Seiko Prospex Turtle Save The Ocean SRPC91K1 Special EditionWe know that many of our readers can’t afford most of the watches we cover on MONOCHROME so, from time to time, we try to show you some decent “value proposition” watches. This Seiko Turtle “Save the Ocean” is not just decent, it is great – like all Seiko Turtle watches. Not only does it look good, with its pebble-like vintage case but it also has an unbeatable quality/price ratio: 200m water-resistant, Seiko’s ultra-reliable movement, great quality of as

SwatchPAY! Will Make Watches Useful Again - Opinion
Here, at MONOCHROME, we adore watches. Mechanical, high-end watches, hand-finished. We're not really the right platform to write about smartwatches, or even quartz watches – this is our editorial choice, and we'll stick to that. But last week, Swatch introduced SwatchPAY!, and that is a big innovation. I actually believe that this new introduction could, in fact, change how a new generation looks at watches. Do you agree?About two and a half years ago, I spoke to Peter Stas, CEO of Frederique Constant. They had just released their Horological Smartwatch and we talked about the usability of smartwatches. I argued that smartwatches needed more functionalities that would make everyday life easier. Like adding an NFC – or Near Field Communication – chip for contactless payments. This chip is about a square millimetre small and is also implemented in your bank card, allowing you to do contactless payments. Stas nodded, and had his answer ready, as he always has: “I k