Seafarers and landfarers now agree at something. It’s the Luminox Navy Seal Colormark series. It’s an exemplified show of military standards including the designs. Strong, rugged and built to withstand far many abuses than a lifetime’s worth of adventures can bring you, on land or in sea. They are intended to stand the tests of time, even the harshest. Amazing are their comfort levels, as well as the refinement. A great little workhorse that rules in the active-duty sectors. It has a mineral crystal.Some go without stopwatch functions but makes it up with the luminescence, the shock resistance, the water resistance and sometimes, a tachymeter. It’s an useful device when you need to calculate average speed to your destination. This, again, makes field-use easy, so you can take them to snorkeling, swimming, climbing or to any other outdoor activity. The carbon-reinforced plastic cases are more rigid and durable than steel. Equally unyielding are the hardened mineral crystals! Together, they make the Colormark appear masculine, aggressive and strong and gives it a lovely feel under the fingers. The Colormark watches have curved lugs that help the case to ease down very securely on the wrist.
The Colormark has been readied for pro-level field use.It makes a solid option among sports watches designed around military themes. Its quartz-crystal movement needs battery changes every four years, but this doesn’t interfere with Luminox’s Always Visible light technology. The Lume will glow for roughly another 25 years since it results from the beta-decay of Tritium, the radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Its atoms are three times the mass of ordinary hydrogen atoms. So the extra electron pops out and hits the coating inside the borosilicate glass capsules, creating energy in the form of light. Don’t worry about the radioactivity; the beta-radiation is a weak one that can’t even go through glass.
It is perfectly normal for someone to pick up one of these and scoff loudly at its lightness (polycarbonate and carbon composites are actually light). The Colormark is best for them with skilled hands, where extra weight slows you down or doesn’t allow you to be as much deft. Even if you are working near magnetic fields, it won’t be affected or affect other devices.
However, the Original Navy SEAL from 1994 is perhaps the most popular Luminox on the map. It has inputs from Chief Nick North (Officer-in-charge; Procurement, Navy SEALs) whose specific designs makes it fit for the most demanding of conditions he could imagine. Luminox stays put on those specs painstakingly and it has been confirmed by some of the elite military and law-enforcement units worldwide. On a whole, the COLORMARK series still stays the best seller for Luminox.
For a moderately long span, my early horological travels were nourished with weird concepts (like Swiss watches are highly delicate and intricate artworks requiring special attention and care both on and off the wrist and so on) that were royally shattered as I went deeper into the horological maze; till what extent I could grab its finer technical details is a topic I’d like to raise elsewhere…perhaps, not at all; if you please but surely, I developed a love for finer things that look and work well. They can be Swiss or otherwise but definitely not Asian, leaving Japan out. The question here is whether the thing really does what its makers claim.
The Swiss-made Luminox RECON Series is one I hold in high regard in this aspect. It’s definitely not for you if fine, gold-toned, razor-edge Swiss is your fascination; this will need you to like the military types. The RECON POINT MAN 8820 doubles-up as a simply efficient navigational tool when you are grounded. You can find out any direction under the sun; its tachymeter scale measuring walking speeds. Trekkers might find this feature interesting and useful. The other one, the RECON-NAV-SPC-8, is a great choice in the RECON Land family. It’s made for professional use – say, tactical reconnaissance. It is kind of an upgrade on the Recon PointMan, but both are cool in their own different ways; The Recon Point Man’s rotating bezel (has a 60-minute counter with navigational ring) and the NAV SPC’s 24 hour scale. But for both, the favorite part is the useful tachymeter.
Tachymeters are kind of a staple in most of the sports chronographs with which, you measure speed, distance and time taken to cover that distance. However, it doesn’t find much usage in an average urban life. But with the Recon Point Man and NAV SPC (short for navigation specialist), you can calculate your walking velocity, much useful for morning walks, jogging – when you are out in the field and need to reach a specific location. It helps you to work out your ETA. You do that by waiting till the seconds hand reaches zero and then see where it places itself on the tachymeter markings once you cover 164 feet. You get that in either miles or kilometers and these watches have that clearly noted (MI/KM) in their serial/reference number. Nobody’s telling it as accurate as a GPS tool, but it works quite well.
The ruler scale on the Recon NAV SPC (on the polyurethane strap) is a good way to measure maps but you can do with it if you are a regular city guy. Those who’ll actually need it already know the way, I don’t need to waste space here.
