Feature: The Best Watches We Reviewed In 2022
2022 has been an absolute bonanza at the Watchfinder channel. I’ve seen some incredible watches from around the world—mainly from Switzerland obviously, but not exclusively—and today I want to show the ten I enjoyed most. Here they are in order, and you’ll find links to the original reviews in the description, too. Stay to the end to see the very best.
Breitling Premier B25 Datora
For a long time Breitling has been challenging for joint first place with old dog food as the most disgusting-looking thing ever made, but thanks to a long hard rethink—and the employment of Creative Director Sylvain Berneron—it’s safe to look directly at a Breitling once again.
I’m not talking about a light makeover here—the Premier B25 Datora isn’t just a tasty looking watch, it’s one of the best-looking timekeepers on the market today. In a bunch of colours and complications, there’s plenty to choose from, up to and including the striking pistachio-coloured variant.
Being a Breitling, it’s still a decently chunky thing, but thanks to some really well considered design details, fans of smaller watches can probably forgive it. It’s not the first Breitling we’ve seen of this new era that takes our fancy, but it’s surely one of the best and I’m glad to see it exists.
Niwa Lunakhod
If you’ve ever wondered what a watch might look like if it was assembled from outdated, Soviet-era electronics, the Niwa Lunakhod is your answer. With two strings of coded orange bulbs from which the hours, minutes and seconds are read in sequence, plus a big blue bulb that tells you when to charge the thing and generally sits there looking pretty, the Lunakhod is a watch that’s just very nice to look at.
If you’ve ever found yourself idly staring into the core of a fire on a camping trip or up at the sodium glow of a streetlight, this is the watch for you. It’s hardly the last word in high horology and you need a magnet on a stick to set the time, but there’s little else out there that’s going to give you the same warm fuzzies you literally get from this watch.
Studio Underd0g Watermelon
I’ve taken a real shine to Studio Underd0g this year, as much for the audacious existence of the brand as for the watches themselves. This is a proper, one-man-band setup and that just makes the success of outrageous pieces like the Watermelon all the more satisfying.
Where else in the watch industry would you see someone combine 1930s chronograph good looks with a colour palette and design inspired by nature’s tastiest treat, the watermelon? Nowhere, and so that’s exactly the opportunity Studio Underd0g pounced on with this watch.
The full set of watches from the brand are great, but the originality of the Watermelon is what really makes me smile. Imagine coming up with an idea in an industry several centuries old that’s never been done before, and making it happen on your Larry. Really cool.
Tudor Black Bay Pro
Right, you’ve got to hand it to Rolex a bit here. They may have done us all over with rising RRPs and limited availability, but at least they felt guilty enough to give us Tudor as well. And what a Tudor the Black Bay Pro is! Shamelessly stealing the looks of the first Rolex Explorer II, it’s the kind of vintage throwback we all want Rolex to make but it will never make.
But instead of locking that IP away in a safe forever more, Rolex let us have it in the Tudor brand. And aside from being a thick little boy, there’s pretty much no trick, no compromise, nothing that makes it suck harder than a new vacuum on its first day on the job.
It’s not only great looking and superbly built, it’s also surprisingly affordable, undercutting all of its big name competition in one fell swoop. I’d complain about Rolex some more, but I’m worried if I do they’ll make Tudor too expensive and hard to get as well…
Kopf Watch
Have you ever wished you had a watch that looked like a robot? That’s a stupid question, of course you have. We all have. And not only does the Kopf watch exist, it’s actually brilliant, too. It’s the kind of watch that looks like it should be made of tin foil and PVA glue, and that was how it’s creator originally intended to be—except being a watchmaker, what started as a silly, fun, side gig ended up being an enormous and very complicated project.
The case itself, made up of many layers of expertly crafted pieces, is a masterclass in machining. The finishing, despite it being a god damned robot, is world class. There are two readouts in the eyes for hours and minutes and a hinged jaw to make it wear well. And it does. It’s a hulking great big robot watch that wears better than the Black Bay Pro.
Its existence is one thing that should be applauded, but the fact it exists because one man couldn’t help himself but go all out on making it is a whole other ball game. They even went as far as engineering a complexly clever module to make it all work, too.
Minhoon Yoo
When you think of watchmaking, South Korea certainly isn’t the first nation to spring to mind, or even the nineteenth, and that’s why self-trained watchmaker Minhoon Yoo decided to change that. Unfortunately, becoming a watchmaker is expensive business, paying for tuition and machinery and such, so Minhoon decided instead to skip school and learn watchmaking from YouTube instead.
That way he could afford the machinery. Except he couldn’t, because machinery is also very expensive. He could afford old, broken machinery instead, so he got that and learnt how to fix it from YouTube first.
Then, piece by piece, literally piece by piece, Minhoon set about building his own watch. He started with a watch made with off-the-shelf parts, taking each piece out and designing it how he wanted it. The result is an evolving concept that bears the hallmarks of its creator’s journey to figure out watchmaking on hard mode.
Grand Seiko Omiwatari SBGY007
What is the perfect watch? A beautiful dial? A complex and exotic movement? Incredible finishing? A bargain price? The Grand Seiko Omiwatari is the closest thing I’ve found to ticking all of those boxes, even if some of those ticks have to be a little smudged.
Grand Seiko of course is known for its beautiful dials, and this one is no exception. Clean and crisp, it showcases the beautiful frozen surface of Lake Suwa, and does so without any other clutter mucking it up apart from the barest minimum.
The smooth sweep and the words, “Spring Drive” tell you the Omiwatari has a Spring Drive movement, the hand wound calibre 9R31, whose architecture just looks every bit the brilliant watchmaking you could hope for. Not to mention that it and the rest of the watch are finished so well it makes you wonder if Grand Seiko holds the watchmakers’ families hostage until it’s done just right.
The only snafu is that it’s not cheap cheap, but at less than a Rolex Submariner—the benchmark for watch prices these days—for what you’re getting it’s close enough to good value to start the cogs whirring.
Kudoke K1
For me, it’s really been a year of small watchmakers hitting the industry hard, and the Kudoke family are no exception. Turns out, old fashioned watchmaking on old fashioned equipment is just the most cost-effective way to do it, and so with the beautifully Germanic Kudoke K1, you get to enjoy some very fine traditional watchmaking whilst also not making your bank manager wish he’d gone to medical school like his parents wanted.
Kudoke is primarily known for exquisite and challenging skeletonization work, but nevertheless he’s been no less gracious in putting his hard work into the K1’s calibre. The styling and finishing reminisce on old English watchmaking—no sniggering at the back—and if you want it engraved or skeletonised, they’d be more than happy to do it. It’s an entirely different experience to what we’ve all become used to.
Mr Jones A Perfectly Useless Afternoon
Who would’ve thought one of my favourite watches this year would have been a cheap quartz? Thanks to the incredibly evocative artwork of Kristof Devos, the Mr Jones A Perfectly Useless Afternoon is one of the watches that’s stuck in my mind ever since I first saw it.
Talk about an impulse purchase. It’s incredible to me how art can capture so much feeling, especially under the tiny lens of a watch crystal, and yet here’s an example that can make me simultaneously happy, wistful, nostalgic and even a little sad all at the same time. It’s just a watch for goodness’ sake and yet it can leave your mind wandering as absently as the character portrayed in the scene. Remember that summer, all those years ago?
Christopher Ward Bel Canto
By this point it’s probably no surprise that my favourite watch that I got to review this year is the Christopher Ward C1 Bel Canto. It does everything watch brands told us wasn’t possibly, combining good looks, high quality and high complication into one affordable package.
Usually when an affordable watchmaker does this it ends up looking like the Luke Hemsworth to the expensive brands’ Chris, but this time Christopher Ward is very much the Chris. If that makes sense. It’s not just good for the money—less than a Black Bay 58 to be specific—it’s good, full stop.
It’s no wonder these things flew off the shelves faster than toilet roll in a pandemic, but you’ll be glad to know Christopher Ward is wangling it so we can all get one. The bigger question, really, is what this means for the industry going forwards. It’s like discovering that supermarket brand pharmaceuticals are exactly the same stuff as the name brands, and from then on, you just can’t go back.
Those are my favourite watches I’ve reviewed this year. What was yours?
