If you haven’t heard of Zelos before it’s not too surprising. Zelos are a young watch brand that was only founded in 2014, so they don’t have the history of the Swiss giants. A Singaporean company that uses Swiss movements, Zelos are the new breed of quality watches that can be obtained for a reasonable price. They certainly aren’t a luxury brand, but do offer great value for money.
As with many modern-day watch brands we see, Zelos was founded on kickstarter and had 3 separate watch launches on the website. It goes without saying that these were a huge success, with Zelos gaining many times the funding needed to complete each project.
With that being said, if you look at the design of Zelos watches, they offer quite a wide variety of smart looking watches and aren’t pinned down to a specific style. Not only this, but under the hood they are really very similar to reputable Swiss brands such as Tissot and Frederique Constant. This is true both in terms of movements used and also the watch materials such as case, bezel and glass.
Table of Contents
Front View – Dial & Bezel
A standard sized 40mm dive watch. As you can see the Spearfish has a style of it’s own and is not just another bad clone of a Submariner or Seamaster.
It is actually quite nice to see a dive watch with a white dial, since these are not too common and underproduced in general. The hands of the watch fit very nicely with the overall color scheme of the watch with the black outlines being very easy to read against the white dial. Even though the seconds hand is orange, it is still extremely easy to see against the white as well.
The ceramic bezel fits well with the overall style of the watch and is not too loud or obnoxious. Once again, the color scheme is kept very simple and is pretty much an inverted version of the dial. White (heavily lumed) numbering against the black background of the bezel is simple to read. The edge of the bezel is serrated, but in a very gentle way. This is both easy to grip and also not overly large at the same time.
As for the rest of the dial, it pretty much follows the traditional layout of a dive watch. The Zelos logo is centered as you would expect with the “Spearfish” watch name under the center point alongside the water resistance of the watch (which is 200 meters).
The only improvement I can think of is personal preference. I think a black date wheel may have looked better and made a good contrast against the white dial.
Case & Bracelet
As with almost every other stainless steel dive watch, Zelos use 316L grade steel. This is has been brushed to a very good standard. Even though the watch pictured was bought second hand from eBay, you can still see that it has been finished to a high standard.
Much like the Rolex Submariner, the lug width of the Spearfish is 20mm. This is a very regular size for a dive watch and ensures that the bracelet is solid, yet not too thick and annoyingly large.
The links used within the bracelet are screw-in links as you would expect for a watch of this standard.
The clasp of the bracelet is really heavy duty and exactly what you would expect from a quality dive watch. Although almost nobody is actually going to go scuba diving with a mechanical watch these days, it is still nice to see that the effort has been put in to have a solid clasp which is not going to spring open underwater.
Specifications & Value For Money
Perhaps the best quality of the Zelos Spearfish is its value for money. In terms of specifications, it actually surprised me how good the movement and finishing of the watch were. Compared to other similarly priced watches, the specifications of the materials are somewhat similar, but the movement is a much higher quality.
I am not the best at taking lume shots in dark rooms, but the above image should give you a good idea of just how good the lume is. Not only are the hour indicators and hands lumed, but the entire dial and bezel are too. The fact that they are both blue/green but are both easily visible. Further research shows this is Super-Luminova X1 grade, which is as good as you can get.
Things only get better from here however. Interestingly, Zelos use a LJP G100 Soigne, which I hadn’t heard of for a very long time and had almost forgotten about this company in all honesty.
LJP (La Joux-Perret) are a Swiss movement manufacturer which were acquired by Japanese watchmaker Citizen. LJP are a little different to ETA since they don’t have the mass production, history or contracts with the Swiss watch community. They are also different to Sellita since they don’t make direct clones of ETA movements.
Instead the LJP movement used can only really be described as a better alternative to the ETA-2824. It works to a similar degree of accuracy, but also has a 68 hour power reserve – not bad for a Swiss movement in a watch that costs less than $1000.
Where To Buy
As with most modern online brands, the best way to buy is direct from the brand here.
Alternatively you could wait until the model of Spearfish you want becomes available on eBay for a cheaper pre-owned price. Although as Zelos are a fairly small brand compared to most watchmakers you know, this could take a while.
One cool feature worth mentioning is that the Spearfish comes in a cool aluminum case. This looks quite futuristic and is quite different from almost every other watch box I have owned before.
