WAY201F.BA0927
Ernest Jones, Sheffield / 7th April 2018
Eight months since my first sighting and I still hadn't tried one of these one, at least until today. After I tried on the new Monaco Gulf 50th Anniversary I thought I might as well give one of these a go, and to be honest I'm still a bit undecided about it.
The bezel looks good, albeit being an aluminium insert rather than ceramic, how long it will remain looking good is open to speculation. The cyclops however, is a disaster. I don't know if it's because the date wheel is black with white text, but the date appears as nothing but a big blurry mess to me. I know I'm not a fan of the old cyclops, but this one seems particularly bad.
The watch has a steel back, which is pretty standard for the 300M Aquaracers, and the bracelet and clasp seem perfectly 'adequate', but no great improvement over, for example, the bracelet and clasp on my Calibre-S CAF7013. The dial is nice enough too, but somehow I couldn't really get excited about it and to be honest I'd have rather put this bracelet on the new Khaki quartz and been done with it. It's a decent size (43mm) and looks better on the wrist than it does in the window, but then all the 43mm Aquaracers look over-sized in the window for some reason.
While I've always been a sucker for colour on watches, I've never been one to get over-excited about the whole Pepsi bezel thing and this hasn't really changed my mind. It will be interesting to eventually see the new 'Batman' bezel Carrera GMT, I have a feeling that one is going to look better than this, just as I always thought the Rolex Batman looked better than the Pepsi GMT.
When I previously wrote about this watch last July, I said the price in the window was £2350, I don't know if that was a mistake or what, but the price is now £2200, which seems pretty fair overall for a Calibre 7 GMT in a 43mm Aquaracer case on a bracelet. I guess if you are a fan of the Pepsi bezel then this is an affordable route to ownership, but with the new Tudor Black Bay GMT coming on to the market at about £2500, this one certainly has it's work cut out for it in the coming months.
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