Fresh from the showcase here at SwissWatchExpo, this morning we are talking about all things
Rolex Deepsea. This is a real big watch. It is a fascinating watch, and for me, it's really kind of
the ultimate Rolex. This is the logical conclusion of everything that Rolex has been doing for the
past hundred years. If you really get down to it, this is ultimately what has evolved into
the Rolex that beats all the other Rolexes in a way. There's a few different nuances and different
variations on them that we'll go over. There are a few different choices for you to make.
If you're ready to step up and take on the real Rolex, the Deepsea. This watch came out in 2008,
and when it originally came out, it just had the black dial. A thing that was different about
this watch at the time, that no watch had ever done before, was the extreme depth resistance.
This one was famously water resistant to 12,800 feet. Now, if you think about it with the advent
of modern diving, suits, things kind of like an IronMan exoskeleton that people wear,
there are things that, vehicles, that people go in to go to extreme depths,
really anything deeper than about a thousand feet is overkill. It's really just for bragging rights,
it's more of a marketing campaign for Rolex. The fact that it's
deep, the water resistance to that depth, but it does show an incredible level of innovation that
the company did to get to that point. When you look at this watch - it's a 44 millimeter case,
though it's much larger than the 40 millimeter Submariner and Seadwellers that came before it.
The helium escape valve of course, is always integral into the side of it.
If you don't know about the helium escape valve, Google it.
It's for saturation diving. It's when you're, one of the accounts I read about a guy who has
done it, took him 44 days to complete the dive. I mean, we're talking about extreme kind of diving
where all of the cells of your body are saturated with the helium mix that you breathe at that kind
of depth. So this is not the thing that most people use this watch for. I'm really going to
focus more on why you would wear this watch as an everyday watch versus why you would use it to go
to the extreme depths. So the helium escape valve is there. It works automatically. What it does
is allow the helium that builds up inside the watch at those extreme depths to escape without
harming the watch. So, most of the time it's just there and you don't worry about it. But
the few things that you notice right off about the watch, when you look at you had it,
it has the unidirectional turning bezel to time things with. You've got a 60 minute
timer. All you do is line the Pearl up with the minute hand, and you can time almost anything.
Of course that's meant for timing dives. The bezel is ceramic with the platinum
inlay numbers. So it's virtually scratch-proof at will not fade, the platinum numbers don't
come out. There's no kind of wear that you would see on the bezel.
It has very large crown guards around the triplock crown, and you can see the case
is really thick. The case on this watch is 17.7 millimeters thick. So it is a
big hefty watch on your wrist. Probably not going to fit it under a dress shirt, but that's not the
point of this watch. Even the crystal, you can see it's slightly domed. The crystal itself has five
and a half millimeters thick. That's to withstand the extreme pressures from those extreme depths.
When you look at the case back, it's very different from other Rolex case backs
in that it has the writing around the edge, and it's a titanium case back.
Rolex typically, all of the steel on it is the 904L steel, but this one is the titanium so
that it could be a good bit thinner and still be strong enough to withstand the pressures.
So the dial itself, it's pretty busy. It's got five lines of texts
just at the bottom. Then it has another three lines up top. There's not a lot of blank space on
the dial, but with the cerachrom that glows blue - that's because in underwater, the wavelengths
of blue make it through better than other wavelengths so it's easier to see underwater.
Of course you see this chromalight on all the other watches now - the newer sport watches.
That chromalight really has a beautiful look when you see it in the dark. The watch when it
came out, had a little bit thinner bracelet than the new ones. We're going to talk about that here
in just a moment, I'll show you the difference between the newer versions and the older ones.
So that was the 2008 mode. In 2012, James Cameron, the film maker, you'll know him from movies like
the Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator 2, Titanic, Avatar. He really has become fascinated
with the oceans and he's an environmentalist, but he is also a bonafide explorer, and he made a trip
in 2012 to the challenger deep. It's the deepest part of the Mariana trench. It's as deep below the
surface of the ocean, as most transatlantic flights fly above the surface of the earth.
It's almost 40,000 feet deep. He went there in a submersible craft with a specially built
Rolex Deepsea strapped to the outside of the vehicle, as well as on his wrist.
So he said that it was his constant companion in the dive. So you know, hats off to James Cameron.
To commemorate that dive in 2012, in 2014 Rolex came out with what they call the Deep Blue dial,
which is nicknamed the James Cameron. You can see this dial fades from the blue that you would see
when you're at the top before you go into the ocean, and it fades into the black that as
you go deeper and deeper in the ocean like James Cameron did, you would actually see the ocean fade
from this blue to black because there's no light down at those depths. So it's an interesting dial.
It is a mystery how they exactly make it with the gradient change from blue to black. It
can't really be imitated, I haven't seen any other company do anything like this. So it's a really
beautiful dial. The word Deepsea on the dial is also in the same green color that the lettering on
James Cameron's vessel was. So it really has a lot of ties to him personally, into that particular
dive attempt that was successful. He actually took a sample of the soil at the bottom, by the way.
So I guess they're still doing experiments on that. The changes came to the model in 2018.
It went from a reference number 116660 to 126660. we have both of them here so you can see
the difference. The changes were very subtle.
One is that the in piece to the bracelet used to protrude, you can see a little bit above the
level of the lugs and on the newer version, it's flush. The big change though, was in the width
of the bracelet. You can see that in the newer one here on my left, your right, the bracelet is wider
and the clasp itself has a lot wider. So it got rid of the complaint that some people had about
it that the watch was a little top heavy. The bracelet was a little skinny for how big the
watch was. So now it's more proportional. They also changed a little bit about the
way the bracelet fits. It's more supple and more comfortable now in the newer edition,
but some people might still like the older one. We have both in stock at SwissWatchExpo.
There is a price differential between them. You'll be able to look at that by putting in the
reference numbers, the 116660 vs the 126660. They also made a change to the movement,
like the other Rolexes that they've upgraded recently with the higher power reserve movement.
Of course it has the Parachrom hairspring and it has the 70 hour power reserve, the accuracy plus,
or minus two seconds. But all of those things to me are less important than the fact that they
made the watch more resistant to magnetic fields, more resistant to shock. The longer power reserve
doesn't really mean a whole lot to me because I buy my watches to wear them so how long they'll
run off my wrist isn't really an issue. I do like the thicker bracelet that they put on the new one.
Both of them have the same interesting glide lock system that they premiered on the Deepsea. While
it's on your wrist or worn off, you can make adjustments to the fit real easily. You just
pull up on this piece here and you can actually slide out a little bit of bracelet or slide
it in if the watch is feeling too loose or too tight on you. I think that's a phenomenal plus
for a watch that is thick and heavy on top of the wrist that you can make that adjustment just
based on whether what you ate the night before, you might want to make a little bit of change.
We've got all these in stock. Give us a call. SwissWatchExpo, visit our website. You'll see
all the variations we have in stock. Hit the bell, like and subscribe, give us some
comments - which ones you like better, whether you think that the 2018 improvements are worth
the price difference or not, and keep an eye here out on SwissWatch expo.com.