Studio 96 / Guide
Six dials, one decision
Case, hands and seconds hand are choices you make once. The dial is the one you keep looking at.
Where the eye goes
Five steps build a Studio 96, and four of them stop registering after a week. The case becomes the shape on your wrist. The hands become the way you read time. The seconds hand is a flash of colour you catch by accident.
The dial is different. It is the surface you actually look at, at a desk, in a car, under a restaurant light. It changes the watch more than any other choice, and it is the one people ask you about.
A dial is not a colour. It is how a colour behaves.
Light does half the work
Product photography flattens dials. In a clean studio shot the marble reads as a pattern and the green reads as green. On a wrist neither of them holds still.
Dark dials close down indoors and open up outside. Green sits close to black under office light, then turns clearly green in daylight. The marble catches light along the veining, so the same dial looks busy in the sun and almost calm at a desk. The galaxy behaves in the way people least expect: it does its best work under one directional light, not in full sun.
Choosing without holding it
You are picking a dial from a screen, which is the honest limitation of buying this way. Two rules hold up anyway.
Keep enough contrast to read the time at a glance. A silver dial in a black case is the sharpest combination in the range, a galaxy dial in a black case is the quietest until light finds it.
Then let one element be the loud one. If the dial is busy, marble or galaxy, a silver seconds hand keeps it settled. If the dial is plain, that is where a red or gold seconds hand earns its place.
What each one does
- Black
- The default. Highest legibility, disappears under a cuff
- Silver
- The brightest of the six. Reads instantly in any light
- Green
- Near black indoors, clearly green in daylight
- Brown
- The only warm dial in the range. Sits well against silver
- Blue marble
- Veined, never the same twice across the surface
- Galaxy
- Flecked like a night sky. Best under directional light
If you get it wrong
Nothing is assembled before the order exists, so what you build in the configurator is what gets put together. The render travels with the order and it is what we work from.
If it arrives and the dial is not what you had in your head, you have 14 days to send it back. If you want a second opinion before you commit, write to us with the combination you are considering.
