Oh, Doxa, how you vex me. There may not be a brand with a legacy and approach to watch design that speaks to me more. Pragmatically, though, I’ve been skeptical of the brand’s value proposition in the deeply crowded dive watch market. I contain multitudes, and they are often in conflict with one another. In several ways, the brand’s new Sub 200T challenged me to reconcile or accept some of my internal contradictions, at least those relevant to watches.
If you aren’t familiar with Doxa, I encourage you to read the Time Bum’s own review of his Sub 300 from 2018 for some background. Loren’s review also provides good context for understanding how the Sub 200T relates to the brand’s archetypal watch, the Sub 300. It is, model-wise, the watch worn by Jacques Cousteau and other pioneers of SCUBA and aquatic exploration. Within that culture, the 300 is as necessary as beanie hats and exposed chest hair. The 200T takes the format of the 300 – well, actually, it hews closer to the 300T – and slims down every dimension.
Where the 300 and 300T wear like comfortable steel ingots topped by a rotating bezel, the 200T is more refined, with the idea that a smaller size and less emphatic wrist presence will broaden the market appeal. It is too early in the 200T’s existence to determine if this appeal will meet Doxa’s expectations (and I doubt they’d send me the numbers anyway), but I can attest to the wearing ease and versatility the slimmed case provides. I may not balk at the idea of wearing a Sub 300 daily, but I’m a nerd with large wrists. The 200T screams mass appeal, without sacrificing the quirk and capability that Doxa is known for.
So, how slim is the 200T? The 39mm case width is 3.5mm narrower than a 300, a notable difference, but not a remarkable dimension within the broader dive watch market, where sizing has trended downward for years. The more impressive dimensions are the 41mm length lug-to-lug, and the 10.7mm height, or lack thereof. 10.7 mm on a watch rated to a depth of 200 meters – madness. For comparison, Seiko’s “Baby Tuna” range, known for their short lug-to-lug span, is still 44mm along that axis. Compared to the 45mm lug-to-lug, and 13.4mm thickness of the Sub 300, the Sub 200T may as well be a dress watch in size.
There’s another metric that is very telling of how the 200T wears – the watch itself weighs just 61 grams without a strap or bracelet. In comparison, my Seiko SPB313 – an eminently comfortable watch, weighs 74g unstrapped. Heck, I have a Hamtun Kraken that is not much wider than the 200T at 41mm, and despite being titanium, outweighs the 200T by 10g when off the bracelet. The watch head of the 200t weighs 20g less than the bracelet does on its own, end links included. Together, the Doxa’s size and weight made it the first dive watch I’ve worn that could reasonably be called dainty, yet it is daintily robust, a flyweight boxer in a tuxedo t-shirt.
Moving from paper to practice, these dimensions and the case’s shape make the Sub 200T extremely comfortable to wear. The midcase is a multitude of curves, primarily delineated by the horizontal chamfers where the case sides meet its upper and lower surfaces. The topside of the case is circular brushed, and evinces a higher quality of workmanship than the good-not-great polishing of the case sides. The obtuse curve along the lug-to-lug axis of the case helps the 200T wear close to the wrist, and the intersecting curves along the top surface provide an interesting shape as the case approaches the bottom of the bezel. As with most of the design choices of Doxa’s Sub lineup, the case shape draws your eye toward the dial.
I don’t have a 300 or 300T to fully verify this, but the narrower profile of the 200T seems to come from shaving off the flange-like extensions of the former’s midcase, rather than an overall shrinking of its dimensions. This means that the dial to case ratio of the 200T puts greater weight on the dial, while my experience with the 300 and 300T is that the case is a much more prominent visual component. Had Doxa just used the mythical horological shrink ray to make the 200T, the dial would have been far too small to carry its abundant visual elements.
The dial layout is similar to the majority of the Doxa Sub lineup, with printed triple-bar markings for the hours, set within the minute track’s thin, long hash marks. For this black dial model – Sharkhunter, in Doxa’s vernacular – the majority of those markings are printed in white, with the light green of the hour markers’ lume the only variation. The heavier weight of the hour markers helps to balance out the date at 3 o’clock. I like that the date wheel isn’t color-matched to the dial, as the white background balances the four cardinal points. The extended lines at the cardinal positions suggest, but don’t complete, a sector division to the dial that helps frame Doxa’s famous offset dial text, all crisply printed in attractive fonts.
The handset is Doxa’s famous, intentionally imbalanced pairing of a short, skinny obelisk hour hand that is painted white, and a much larger orange obelisk hand to track the minutes. In short, the functional intent is to emphasize the passage of minutes, which are of more importance in timing dives than the passage of hours. Last is the seconds hand, with its quirky lume box. I’ve seen Doxa critiqued for not having great lume, and while it may not be exceptional on the 200T, it is more than good enough. The hands, particularly the over-weighted hour hand, glow brighter than the hour markers and bezel pip, but the hour markings are functionally sufficient.
To track dive times, the 200T is equipped with Doxa’s dual-scale rotating bezel. The inner ring, printed in black, is a typical count-up timer. The outer scale aids in calculating time and depth to avoid hazardous decompression. For a deeper description of this, check out Doxa’s own overview. Though I am not cool enough to utilize the bezel to its full capacity, its 120 precise clicks helped me easily monitor how far my various meetings ran over their allotted time. Bezel operation is easy, as the tophat style separates the crenelated grip from the case, enabling even the meatiest of digits to find purchase.
Motivating the timekeeping in the 200T is the well-known Sellita SW200-1. Doxa utilizes a COSC version of this movement in the 300, but the 200T and 300T are equipped with this non-COSC version. While I’ve had issues with a couple of these movements in the past, the one I had on hand worked well.
The 200T’s short lug-to-lug distance, and the minimal caseback protrusion, allow the famously comfortable Doxa beads of rice bracelet to hug your wrist as a jewelry bracelet would. I wouldn’t even call it a drape, more of an encircling. Interestingly, I found myself using the diving extension in the clasp not only to resize while wearing the 200T, but also to put the watch on. Because of the 41mm lug-to-lug, the combination of watch and bracelet was just large enough to get around my hand once the bracelet was sized. This is more observation than critique. The 200T’s dimensions, and how they translate to wearing the watch, continually surprised me.
Well-made and beautiful as the bracelet is, it falls short of greatness in this application. Doxa was very effective in scaling down the elements of 300 series, such that the 200T presents as a deeply cohesive and balanced watch. With the bracelet, the main observable change was scaling the endlinks to fit the 200T’s 18mm lug width, and that’s it. Where the head of the 200T has a delicate fineness of proportion and design, the bracelet is heavy and blunt, aesthetically. Had Doxa refined the links of the bracelet to be less thick, and to taper from lug to clasp, it would better match the watch itself. As presently offered, the bracelet leaves the watch feeling over-strapped.
Despite that, I still am ardently team buy-the-bracelet with the 200T. It isn’t visual perfection, but it also isn’t bad, and is still comfortable to wear. Additionally, given the 200T’s very short lug-to-lug distance, the fitted and curved rubber strap is going to cut into the wrist of a lot of wearers. If you have wrist over, say, 6 inches in circumference, you are better off with a non-fitted and curved rubber or silicone strap, or as is my wont, a NATO-style strap. Putting the 200T on a fabric strap fully set off the watch’s excellent proportions, and immediately changed my perspective of the 200T.
Looking with a material objectivity, I can’t say my time with the Doxa 200T solidified my sentiments on Doxa’s value proposition. It is a very nice watch, but I can’t point to any single physical, functional attribute that makes it stand out in a crowded space. But, there’s no way around the existence of ‘Doxa magic’ – the intangible elements of the brand and its watches that make the total experience greater than what is revealed by scrutinizing their details. The reality of our times is that you can, indeed, put a price on cool, and on heritage, and I don’t fault Doxa for doing so. Ultimately, wearing the 200T led me to stop thinking about the watch connected to its price tag, and to surrender to the joy it inspired.
For additional variations of the 200T, and pricing and purchasing options, check Doxa’s dedicated page for the lineup.
