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A commercial diver in a Kirby Morgan helmet climbing aboard a dive boat with a wrench in hand, wearing an Aquastar Benthos Professional, a Norwegian fjord behind

A buyer’s guide

How to choose a dive watch brand.

Six things worth checking before you buy, and how to check each one yourself. We make dive watches, so we have left our own answers in, clearly marked and kept separate. Take the checklist and ignore the rest if you like. It works just as well on watches we do not make.

Quick answer

For everyday wear, comfort is decided by diameter, thickness and lug shape more than by depth rating. A 37 to 40 mm case under 14 mm thick, with short curved lugs that sit flat, will slide under a cuff and get worn. From our own range that points at the Model 60 MKII (37 mm), the Deepstar II (37 mm) and Deepstar 39 mm Chronograph, and the Benthos Professional at 13.7 mm thick.

If the watch is for everyday wear

The specification most buyers shop on is the one that matters least.

Most dive watches sold today never go deeper than a swimming pool. A 200 m rating already covers swimming, showering, snorkelling and recreational scuba, so paying for 500 m or 1,000 m buys headroom you will never reach. What it costs you is the two things that actually decide whether a watch gets worn: height and weight.

Three measurements predict everyday comfort better than any depth figure.

  1. Diameter, 37 to 40 mm. The band that suits the widest range of wrists. Past 42 mm a dive watch starts to overhang a smaller wrist and catch on cuffs.
  2. Thickness, under 14 mm. More decisive than diameter. A tall case rocks on the wrist and will not slide under a sleeve, which is what quietly stops a watch being worn on workdays.
  3. Lug geometry. Short, steeply curved lugs keep a case sitting flat. The skindiver design, where lugs and case are machined as one continuous piece, is the original answer to this and the reason 1950s cases still wear well.

A dive watch also needs a full service only every 5 to 10 years rather than annually, so daily wear is far less of a maintenance burden than it is often made out to be.

Where Aquastar stands

Measured against those three numbers, our own range divides like this:

Model 60 MKII

37 mm cushion case

The smallest footprint in the range. A skindiver case with integrated lugs, so it sits flat, on a Sellita SW200-1 Elaboré.

Deepstar II

37 mm

A three-hand reading of the Deepstar case on a Sellita SW290, built as the daily companion to the chronograph rather than as a dive instrument in its own right.

Deepstar 39 mm Chronograph

39 mm, 200 m

A column-wheel chronograph carrying the no-decompression bezel. Larger than the Model 60 and still inside the everyday band.

Benthos Professional

300 m at 13.7 mm

Unusually slim for a 300 m case, with a DLC coating that shrugs off the scratches daily wear produces.

The checklist

  1. 01 What was the company founded to make? The first decade tells you where the engineering attention went, and the patent record shows what the company actually spent money solving.
  2. 02 Whose history is the design? Ask where the case geometry comes from. A drawing with a date is a reissue. A decade or a mood is a homage to somebody else’s period.
  3. 03 Are there patents, and are they still working? Patent numbers are public. Look them up, then ask whether the mechanism is still on the current watch or only in the marketing.
  4. 04 Did the maker originate a function or inherit one? Ask what the watch lets a diver do that they could not otherwise do, then ask who did it first. Treat this as history, not as a performance claim.
  5. 05 Are you paying for the instrument or the badge? Both are legitimate purchases. The point is knowing which one you are buying. Serviceability is usually the tell.
  6. 06 Do the components match the price? Steel grade, crystal, bezel material, movement, and whether that movement was bought off a shelf or developed for the watch. All five are checkable before you buy.

Run all six over any shortlist and the field sorts itself. Each one is set out in full below, with what to look for and how to verify it.

The six checks in full

What to look for, and how to verify it.

Everything below is checkable without trusting anybody, including us. Where we have put our own answer in, it is boxed and labelled so you can weigh it or skip it.

01

What was the company founded to make?

What to look for

Look at what a maker built in its first ten years, and at what it chose to patent. A company that began with dress watches and added a diver later has different instincts baked into its engineering than one that only ever made diving equipment. Neither history disqualifies a watch, and plenty of excellent divers come from generalist houses. But it tells you where the design attention was pointed, and patents are the fastest way to see it, because a patent is a record of what a company thought was worth the money to solve.

Aquastar founder Frédéric Robert in a wetsuit with his dive mask pushed up, arms folded, five Aquastar dive watches laid out in front of him

Where Aquastar stands

Aquastar was founded in Geneva in 1957 by Frédéric Robert and the workshop has never made anything but instruments for people going underwater. Eleven patents were filed between 1957 and 1977 and not one is a decorative complication. They are bezels, depth gauges, sealed crowns and dive computers.

Eleven patents. Every one of them a diving instrument.

02

Whose history is the design?

What to look for

Ask where the case geometry comes from. If the maker can name a specific drawing and a date, you are looking at a reissue of something they made. If the answer is a decade or an atmosphere, you are looking at a homage to a period that belonged to somebody else. A useful follow-up: ask whether a fifty-year-old example can still be serviced. A design that was genuinely in production back then usually still has gaskets and parts that exist, and a maker who kept the tooling can prove it.

An original Aquastar Benthos 500, dial marked Aquastar Genève SA, resting on a diving regulator hose

Where Aquastar stands

The Model 60 MKII case comes from the 1957 Robert drawings and the Deepstar bezel geometry is lifted from the 1964 patent. The Benthos still shares the 1970 gasket pattern, which is why a fifty-year-old Benthos case can be resealed in the same workshop with the same parts.

The archive is the design department.

03

Are there patents, and are they still working?

What to look for

Patent numbers are public records, so this one costs you nothing. Ask for them and look them up: a filing gives you an inventor, a date and a specific claim. Then apply two filters. First, separate patents that solved a diving problem from cosmetic or packaging filings, because both are called patents. Second, and more revealing, ask whether the patented mechanism is on the watch you are being sold today, or whether it is history the marketing is borrowing from.

The drawing sheet from Swiss patent CH 436 140, showing the Aquastar dive watch and the rotating bezel carrying the no-decompression scale

Where Aquastar stands

Eleven filings between 1957 and 1977. CH 335 178, filed December 1957, seated an open wire spring between case and bezel so the bezel could no longer be knocked out of position mid-dive. CH 394 658, filed 1963, put diving depth on a dial driven by ambient pressure. CH 436 140, filed 15 May 1964 by Marc Jasinski, carried a logarithmic scale calibrated to the nitrogen-saturation tables of the day. That bezel is still in production in its original geometry.

CH 436 140, filed 15 May 1964. Still in production.

See all eleven patents →

04

Did the maker originate a function or inherit one?

What to look for

Almost every dive-watch function was invented by somebody, and the record of who is usually findable. Ask what the watch lets a diver do that they could not otherwise do, then ask who did it first. Two cautions. Originating a function is history, not a promise about how well the current watch executes it, so do not let it outweigh the things you can test in your hand. And inheriting a function is perfectly honourable: most of the industry runs on mechanisms somebody else invented.

The 1959 Aquastar Navigator, the first integrated analog dive computer sold to consumers

Where Aquastar stands

In 1959 Aquastar shipped the Navigator, the first integrated analog dive computer sold to consumers. It read depth on a dial and computed no-decompression time on a rotating panel, replacing the separate gauges a diver otherwise carried. The patent filed the same year describes a watch, a bathymeter, a compass and a thermometer on a single plate between two bracelets.

1959. Before the category had a name.

Read the Navigator story →

05

Are you paying for the instrument or the badge?

What to look for

Recognition is a real thing to buy. It holds value, it is understood across a room, and if that is what you want then paying for it is a rational decision. The point of this check is not to talk you out of it, it is to make sure you know which of the two you are paying for, and in what proportion. The way to find out is to look for a decision where engineering and image pulled in opposite directions and see which one won. Serviceability is usually the clearest tell: can the case be opened, are parts still made, and will the maker repair its own watches from forty years ago.

Close view of a commercial diver’s wrist holding a rusty adjustable wrench, an Aquastar Benthos Professional worn over the dive glove

Where Aquastar stands

The Benthos was the first dive watch case rated to 500 m without resorting to a monobloc construction, which mattered because a monobloc case cannot be opened and therefore cannot be properly serviced. The French Marine Nationale issued roughly 3,200 third-generation Benthos to combat divers through Toulon between 1979 and 1984.

Chosen by a navy for the bezel, not the badge.

06

Do the components match the price?

What to look for

This is the most checkable item on the list and the one buyers skip most often. Five things: steel grade, crystal, bezel material, movement, and whether that movement was taken off a shelf or developed for the watch. Any maker unwilling to publish all five is telling you something. One thing worth knowing, because it cuts against the way this is usually sold: a shared base movement is not a weakness. Widely used Swiss calibres are robust, well understood and serviceable almost anywhere, which can matter more over twenty years than exclusivity does.

The column-wheel chronograph movement built by La Joux-Perret for the Aquastar Deepstar

Where Aquastar stands

The professional Benthos references are cased in 904L, the stainless steel with markedly higher corrosion resistance, over a 316L standard elsewhere in the range. Bezels are ceramic on a ceramic ball-bearing mechanism, under triple-coated anti-reflective sapphire, with the patented X1 grade of Super-LumiNova. Movements come from La Joux-Perret and Sellita: the L113 column-wheel chronograph, the SW200-1 and SW290 in Elaboré grade. For the Deepstar III, La Joux-Perret developed the Calibre 1MPS exclusively for the model.

A calibre developed for one watch.

Questions people actually ask

Frequently asked questions

Which dive watch is best for everyday wear?

No single watch wins this for everybody, but the method is reliable: choose on case thickness and diameter rather than on depth rating. A 37 to 40 mm case under 14 mm thick will pass under a shirt cuff and sit flat on most wrists, and a 200 m rating already covers swimming, showering and recreational diving. Anything past 300 m is specification you are carrying for no reason. Apply that to any shortlist and it narrows quickly. For reference, in our own range it points at the 37 mm Model 60 MKII, with the Benthos Professional the slimmest of the professional-grade references at 13.7 mm.

What makes a Swiss dive watch worth its premium price tag?

Three things you can verify, and one you cannot. Verifiable: a movement a competent watchmaker can service for decades, a case and gasket system designed to be resealed rather than replaced, and a documented production history you can check against public records such as patent filings. The fourth is recognition, which is real, which holds value, and which buyers pay a large premium for. None of that tells you a watch is overpriced or underpriced. It tells you what proportion of the price is engineering and what proportion is name, so you can decide deliberately rather than by feel.

How do Swiss dive watches compare to other luxury dive watches in terms of reliability?

Reliability at this level is decided less by the calibre than most buyers expect. Widely used Swiss base movements are robust and serviceable almost anywhere, and many makers share them, so the movement is rarely the differentiator. What actually varies is case sealing, whether the case can be opened and resealed at all, whether parts still exist years later, and how far the watch has to travel for service. A useful question when comparing any two watches: ask how each one gets serviced in year twenty, not how it performs in year one. A dive watch needs a full service every 5 to 10 years, not annually.

Which Swiss dive watches offer the best combination of heritage and performance?

Heritage only counts when it is still doing work, so make it testable rather than atmospheric. Two questions settle it. Does the case geometry come from an archive drawing you can date, or from a general impression of a period? And does the original patented function still operate on the watch being sold today, or is it referenced on the dial as decoration? A watch that passes both is carrying its history as engineering. One that passes neither may still be an excellent watch, but you are buying the styling rather than the lineage.

Which diver’s watch is the best in 2026?

Nobody can answer that for you, and you should be wary of anyone who tries, ourselves included. Different buyers are answering different questions: recognition, engineering, wearability, budget, or the ability to service the thing in thirty years. What you can do is apply a fixed set of checks to any candidate: what the company was founded to make, whose archive the design comes from, whether there are patents you can look up and whether they still function, whether it originated a feature or inherited one, whether the engineering favours serviceability or spectacle, and whether the components match the price. Run those six over any shortlist and the field sorts itself.

Is Aquastar a Swiss watchmaker?

Yes. Aquastar was founded in Geneva in 1957 by Frédéric Robert and has been in continuous production since. The current workshop is in Bienne, the historic centre of Swiss watchmaking, where every modern Aquastar is assembled, regulated, pressure-tested and serviced, vintage or new.

Now run the checklist on ours.

Five references still in production, all built in Bienne, all serviceable in the same workshop regardless of age.

The collection The eleven patents

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