Mmmmm, nope!  Blancpain has no mojo…

I have not seen much from Blancpain yet this year, and what I have heard has been, well, less than impressive.  For 2010 Blancpain expands the Fifty Fathoms collection to embrace the complications of a moon phase and a complete calendar married with the traditional sport companion of a column-wheel controlled flyback chronograph, and I must say that I don’t like it.  There is too much going on in this watch that is wholly inconsistent with the identity of what is otherwise a storied luxury dive watch line (that is, the Fifty Fathoms).  Not to mention that after seeing the Oktopus Moonphase watch from Linde Werdelin, I think the bar was set impossibly high for most brands to keep up with this year in the dive watch segment, and that now includes Blancpain.

On the (small) plus side, the watch does utilize Blancpain’s patented “under lug correctors” that eliminate the need for adjusters on the sides of the case and which allow finger-tip setting in place of an adjusting tool.  The under lug correctors are also used on another new watch from Blancpain this year, the Villeret Moon Phase.

I don’t want to dwell on the subject, but as a member of the Swatch Group’s “prestige brands” segment, I think Blancpain needs to step up its game.  I don’t have any good sense of the brand’s direction nor do I see from it an outsanding watch that is defining the brand at the moment.  Maybe the Super Trofeo, which was a cool new intro last year, but that’s all that comes to mind.  To be perfectly blunt, I have a real hard time finding a reason to get excited about the brand, which means that this may be the last watch you see from the brand here on this blog until Baselworld 2011…OK that it unlikely, but still…