Tested: The Best Entry-Level Luxury Watches for the New Collector

While there is certainly plenty of joy to be had in collecting affordable watches, the siren song of the luxury watch often proves too tempting for many a collector to ignore. The story is almost always the same. A person develops a passing interest in mechanical watches. They pick up an affordable automatic, maybe a Seiko. Then they decide to expand their collection and add another affordable to the mix. Then another. And before you know it, they’re budgeting five grand to graduate to their first “big boy” watch from the likes of Omega and Tudor. We’ve seen it happen a thousand times. 

But luxury watches are a significant investment, and we wouldn’t want you to waste your money on the wrong one. That’s why we’ve put together this guide to the best luxury watches for the new collector. So, whether you’re in the market for a snazzy dress watch, a rugged diver, or a high-flying travel watch, you’ll find something to suit your needs and budget below. What’s more, we’ll also be delving into what factors make for a solid investment watch for collectors, and which elements are the most important to consider when actually shopping for the watch. 

There are numerous factors that contribute to a watch being a good choice from an investment standpoint. There are occasional exceptions and outliers, but generally speaking, these following rules will hod true across the board. 

Brand: The single biggest factor that impacts a watch’s value and conduciveness to investment is almost certainly the brand that makes it. For this reason, buying a watch as an investment is typically safest when going through a well-established company with a long proven track record of producing watches that maintain their value — if not increase in it. Unsurprisingly, this means horological outfits like Rolex, Omega, Patek Philippe, and Audemars Piguet will almost always be your best choices, though these watches come at a high price. 

Model & Reference: For the same reason that it makes sense to buy from a well-established elite brand, it also makes just as much sense to opt for a well-established model with a proven record of holding its value or steadily appreciating. This often means selecting flagship watches, or some of the most iconic models offered by exclusive horological outfits such as the Speedmaster for Omega, the Nautilus for Patek Philippe, the Royal Oak for Audemars Piguet, and the Submariner for Rolex. With that said, there’s nothing wrong with opting for one of the cheaper watches from any of these more elite brands as a starter investment or collector’s watch.

Limited Editions & Rare Variants: Rare watches are often extremely valuable, which can make limited edition releases and rare variants of already popular or iconic watches great investments — and great additions to any collection. It is, however, worth pointing out that purchasing a limited edition or rare variant of a new luxury watch can be risky, as occasionally these timepieces are horological flops with little to no demand. 

Raw Materials: Though it might be the fact that it says “Rolex” on the dial that gives it such immense value, there’s no arguing that part of the overall value of a luxury watch is the raw precious materials used to make it — especially on watches made from silver, platinum, or gold — or, titanium, albeit to a lesser extent. This admittedly accounts for only a small portion of a luxury watch’s value, though it’s nonetheless worth touching on and acknowledging.  

Hype Versus Personal Interest: A major factor in your search for an investment-grade watch for your collection should be your personal taste. If you’re simply seeking to make the most money on your investment in the quickest possible amount of time, luxury watch buying probably isn’t for you, as there are much faster, more lucrative, and more secure options for investment other than watch buying. For this reason, if you don’t actually enjoy owning, wearing, or at least regularly looking at these watches, then there really is no point in buying them. As such, it’s important to purchase watches that you actually like and enjoy, versus investing in whatever happens to be the most publicized or hyped watch release at that time. 

Now that you’re up to speed on what factors make a watch ideal as an investment, let’ dive into the most crucial areas to consider when actually looking at the watches themselves. 

Case: As the component that actually comprises the watch itself, it’s hard to overstate the importance of the case when looking at any watch — high-end luxury timepieces very much included. When examine this aspect of a watch, you’ll want to review a case’s shape, shape, and size — including the case width, lug width, lug-to-lug, and case thickness, and design. The material selection is also of utmost importance, as is the level of finish in terms of how evenly and uniformly it’s been brushed or polished. Whats more, you’ll also want to look into secondary case elements such as a case’s crown and bezel. 

Bracelet Or Band: Though bands and bracelets are admittedly pretty easy to swap out, the reality is that all luxury watches are designed from the ground up as cohesive whole designs that very much include their band or bracelet. For this reason, it’s very much worth reviewing the type of strap, band, or bracelet that comes on a watch, the materials used to make these items, and their buckle, hardware, and micro-adjustment capabilities. With more high-end watches, it’s also not uncommon to see timepieces sold with more than one included strap, bracelet, or band. 

Movement: Another one of the factors that distinguishes luxury watches from budget watches is the movements found inside them. Luxury watches almost exclusively utilize automatic or hand-wound mechanical movements — many of which are developed partially or entirely in house by these luxury watch outfits. On top of looking into the type of caliber and movement being used, you’ll also want to review that movement’s specs or capabilities such as its number of jewels, beat rate, and power reserve.

Build Quality & Finish: When designing and crafting luxury watches, high-end brands thoroughly consider ever surface and centimeter of the product, meticulously sweating every minor detail. These watches are then carefully and expertly hand-assembled and finished, using incredibly stringent standards for quality control and overall build quality. While this does come at a high price, it’s this top-shelf level of fit and finish that ultimately plays a massive role in separating top-shelf luxury watches from more affordable, value-focused timepieces on the market. As such, it’s crucial to explore the types of finishes present on each face of the watch. 

Manufacturer, History, & Lineage: There are plenty of great micro brands and other newer watch companies out there that we’d normally consider when buying a new watch, however, when purchasing a watch as an investment, it’s almost always safest to buy from an older, well-established brand. Modern iterations of age-old timepieces with a robust history and linage typically hold their value quite well, and are at least usually somewhat predicable in terms of their market value — and future value projections. 

For this guide, we played in the sandbox of watches valued at $2,000 to $6,000 — give or take — to hone in on the timepieces that the fledgling luxury watch buyer would likely be interested in. From there, we broke it down by watch style type, selecting the best watches in their respective categories to match what you’re looking for. This ultimately allowed us to piece together an initial list of references that we expected to stand as one of the best currently available. After completing this list, we then sourced an example of each and every watch, before individually putting them to the on-wrist test. 

The period spent actually experiencing these luxury watches on-wrist allowed us to glean an extraordinary amount of information on each timepiece’s level of comfort, how difficult it was swapping out straps or bands or removing links, and how these watches actually look and feel in person. Additionally, our testing phase also let us compare each watch’s advertised accuracy to the accuracy we experienced firsthand. Most importantly, on-wrist testing allowed us to closely examine the fit and finish on each and every watch. Because level of polish, fit and finish, and overall build quality are such massive parts of what separate true luxury watches from their budget counterparts, this component of our testing was absolutely essential, plus allowed us to review each watch individually, as well as comparing and contrasting them side-by-side. And after an extended period of in-person testing, we then narrowed our initial list down to our finalized picks — shining a light on our absolute favorites in detail, while also highlighting a few very close runner-ups. 

Oris Big Crown ProPilot Big Date

Best Intro To Luxury: Let’s be honest: even if you are ready to spend a lot of money on a luxury watch, you might still prefer to dip a toe rather than take the plunge. In other words, if you’re looking to get into the luxury watch game without spending over $2k, then you really ought to be looking at Oris. The famously independent Swiss brand has many offerings at such a price point, but we prefer the Big Crown ProPilot Big Date.

A modernized take on a pilot’s watch (as opposed to the brand’s more traditional Big Crown series), the ProPilot features a sleek design with an excellent articulating bracelet with a cheeky aviation-themed clasp, bright and bold applied Arabic indices, and a trademark knurled bezel with matching big crown (naturally).

NOMOS Orion 38

Best Dress Watch: Based in Glashütte, the traditional German epicenter of watchmaking, NOMOS has lots of wonderful options in this price bracket, especially when it comes to dress watches. But there’s something about the beautiful simplicity of the Orion that makes it the watch for us.

A stunning example of NOMOS’s mastery of Bauhaus design, the watch keeps things uncluttered — as a dress watch should — with stick hands, thin baton indices, a small seconds complication, and a no-date, hand-wound movement. The movement is NOMOS’s own legendary Alpha Caliber, a dressed-to-the-nines 2.6mm-thick wonder that keeps the Orion’s case profile razor-thin at just 8.9mm. The Horween Shell Cordovan strap is also a standout.

Longines Avigation Bigeye

Best Chronograph Watch: Thanks to their long association with motorsports, aviation, and even space travel, nothing says “cool” quite like a chronograph. Picking up a solid luxury mechanical chrono in our price bracket is no easy task, but Longines has a great one in the Avigation BigEye. A modernized reboot of a Longines piece from the 1930s, this stunner has loads of cachet and flair.

The petroleum blue dial features a grained pattern and fades to black as you near the minute track, the oversized crown and pushers add plenty of character while also providing ease of use, and the namesake “Big Eye” chronograph minute counter is a lovely quirk. Bringing it all together is a titanium case that keeps everything light on the wrist.

Tudor Black Bay GMT

Best Travel Watch: If you plan on doing some globetrotting with a luxury timepiece on your wrist, you really ought to pick up a GMT. Our pick in that realm, unequivocally, is Tudor’s Black Bay GMT. The spiritual sibling to sister brand Rolex’s iconic GMT Master II (and a more accurate representation of the classic Pepsi GMTs of decades past than Rolex’s current product), this Tudor is a modern GMT with plenty of retro style.

Its bidirectional aluminum bezel features a classy and classic red and blue pattern, its matte black dial provides excellent contrast with all four lumed hands, and it even boasts an in-house, COSC-certified, “true” GMT movement with an independently adjustable hour hand that allows you to update your local time to a new time zone without disturbing the watch’s timekeeping.

Check out our in-depth Tudor Black Bay GMT review here.

Grand Seiko SBGA427

Best Everyday Watch: An everyday or “GADA” (Go Anywhere, Do Anything) watch needs to do a lot of things well. It should be robust, easy to care for, and work in casual and formal situations. That’s what many watches from Grand Seiko’s Heritage Collection, such as the SBGA427, do with perfection. Beautifully finished with the brand’s famed Zaratsu polish and trademark sharp hands and indices, the watch toes the line between sporty and dressy with ease.

It boasts 100m water resistance, a three-link stainless steel bracelet, and most impressive of all, it houses Grand Seiko’s own revolutionary hybrid Spring Drive movement that combines the accuracy of quartz timekeeping with the craftsmanship, soul, and decoration of an automatic.

Check out our in-depth review of the SBGA467 reference of this Grand Seiko Spring Drive watch here. 

 Omega Seamaster 300

Best Dive Watch: Omega’s updated version of the original Seamaster 300 from 1957 — the brand’s first professional dive watch — looks like a surviving relic from the mid-century, but it’s actually a thoroughly-modern luxury timepiece.

The watch’s “vintage” Super-LumiNova lume, iconic broad arrow handset, thin dive bezel, and lack of crown guards all scream “retro,” but its showstopping finishing (especially the Geneva waves in arabesque decoration on the displayed movement), polished ceramic bezel with Liquidmetal diving scale, and METAS-certified Master Co-Axial calibre 8400 movement with magnetic resistance to 15,000 gauss are all thoroughly 21st century.

Check out our in-depth Omega Seamaster 300 review here.

We found it hard to limit ourselves to just six top luxury watches, so here are four more that you should strongly consider as your first big purchase.

Hamilton Intra-Matic Chronograph H

While Hamilton is most certainly a legendary watch brand thanks to their time spent as an American watchmaker and their long-running association with Hollywood, they’re not always considered a luxury brand, as many of their watches come in under $1,000. But Hamilton, which like Longines and Omega is a member of the Swatch Group, does indeed make luxury watches. One of their priciest pieces, which comes in at the lower end of the spectrum as far as luxury watches go, is this gorgeous manual-wind chronograph. A modernized yet faithful version of a Hamilton chrono from the ’60s, the Intra-Matic H just oozes old-school cool with its box-shaped sapphire crystal, mesh bracelet, and panda dial.

Bell & Ross BR 03-92

The watches we’ve recommended up to this point have all been rather classic. We’ve had some splashes of color here and there, but everything’s been largely restrained and, often, vintage-inspired. But if you’re someone who’s looking for something a bit more, shall we say, conspicuous for your first luxury watch, then Bell & Ross will deliver in spades. The French-owned, Swiss-made brand is known for their unique and oversized pilot’s instruments watches that look like they were ripped from the cockpit of a fighter jet. The BR 03-92 is one of their most classic looks, with its signature massive square matte black ceramic case housing its round dial with high-vis hands and indices.

Cartier Tank Must XL

One of the oldest extant watch designs and a true icon in the industry is Cartier’s timeless dress watch, the Tank. Originally designed to resemble the image of a WWI-era tank from above, the legendary timepiece has graced the wrist of everyone from Muhammad Ali to Clark Gable to Andy Warhol… will you be next? Impressive pedigree aside, the Tank remains a perfect dress watch over a century after its inception, especially this Must XL version as it offers a more modern, larger case and houses an in-house automatic movement. But don’t worry, you’re still getting all the classic goodies like the silvered flinqué dial and heat-treated blued-steel hands.

IWC Mark XX

In 1948, the British Royal Air Force tasked IWC with developing an amagnetic instrument watch for its pilots and navigators, leading to the inception of the now-legendary Mark 11. The more recently-released IWC Mark XX stands as a modern day successor to the Mark 11, and features a 40mm stainless steel case housing a blue high-contrast dial in a classic Type A Flieger layout, complete with white numerals and indices, rhodium-plated hands, and IWC’s signature triangular index at 12 o’clock. At the heart of the Mark XX is the IWC-manufactured 32111 caliber automatic movement which boasts a generous 120-hour power reserve. Water resistant down to 100 meters, this Swiss-made watch also comes paired with a calfskin leather strap and features IWC’s  integrated EasX-CHANGE system. At the end of the day, if you’re considering a high-end luxury watch, it never hurts to look at available references from one of the five original  Flieger makers, one of which is IWC (with the other four being Stowa, Laco, A. Lange & Söhne, and Wempe). 

The Best Affordable Alternatives To Iconic Luxury Watches

Not quite ready to invest in a luxury watch? No worries, we’ve got you covered. Have a look at our guide to the best affordable alternatives to iconic luxury watches to find something that will tide you over until you’re prepared to make that leap to luxury.