Hands-on photography by Ed Rhee
Despite producing a broad range of rugged, capable sports watches with hefty water-resistance ratings, it’s been many years since Zenith produced a traditional dive watch. That is, until Watches and Wonders Geneva 2024 rolled around, at which point the brand unveiled not one but two visions of a diver with a distinctive Zenith spirit. While the aggressive, modern Defy Extreme Diver has captured most of the early press attention, Zenith’s return to one of its classic late ‘60s references is potentially even more compelling. The new Zenith Defy Revival A3648 continues the brand’s streak of faithful, charismatic, and beautifully executed vintage reissues with a vibrant, punchy color palette, a funky geometric design, and truly heavy-duty underwater capability.
Like its original 1969 forebear, the Zenith Defy Revival A3648 begins with a 37mm wide stainless steel case. The case shape should be somewhat familiar to fans of the brand, with a similar angular, octagonal silhouette to the rest of the Defy Revival lineup. However, this is a bulkier, more purposeful take on the same theme, ditching the curved planar surfaces of the previous Defy Revival’s hooded lugs in favor of broad, triangular chamfers. Especially for the case side chamfers, this gives the A3648 far wider polished surfaces to work with than its stablemates, but that’s far from the only attention-grabbing design tweak to this case. The most obvious shift here is the case thickness. The Defy Revival A3648 measures in at 15.5mm from the caseback to the top of the crystal, and with such a compact case diameter, there simply isn’t an elegant way to hide this bulk on the wrist. Zenith embraces the heft instead, allowing this case to sit tall and surprisingly top-heavy on the wrist for a heavy-hitting utilitarian feel.
In addition, the screw-down crown is partially recessed and moved to the 4:30 position for greater security, a move that also drastically changes the overall character of the design on the wrist, ridding it of the more lightly-built models’ integrated-sports-watch-adjacent feel. Naturally, the new unidirectional dive bezel also goes a long way towards shifting the A3648’s personality in a more aggressive direction, with a heavy gear-toothed edge and a nigh-on fluorescent orange dive scale insert topped with sapphire for that old-school, bakelite-style feel. All these heavy-duty accoutrements aren’t just for show, however, as Zenith rates the watch for a hefty 600 meters of water resistance. Coincidentally, 600 meters also measures out to 1,969 feet, a sly reference to the year of the original Defy A3648’s launch. Despite this more hardcore, purposeful construction, Zenith still fits the Defy Revival A3648 with a sapphire display caseback to showcase its decorated movement.
Compared with the layered, geometric case design, the Zenith Defy Revival A3648’s dial is simple and straightforward. That isn’t to say it’s demure, or course, as traffic-cone orange accents for the minutes track and handset make this sharp, legible layout unmissable from across a room. The ‘60s diver-style pairing of a broad baton hours and an arrow-tipped minutes hand keep the feel suitably vintage on the wrist, while the generous lume fills for both these and the printed rectangular indices should make this an easy watch to read even in pitch-dark conditions. The signature Zenith 4:30 date window cuts through the vivid orange minutes track here, making the white date wheel stand out even more dramatically than usual. These date windows have historically been a Marmite inclusion on previous Zenith models, and the execution here isn’t likely to make things any less controversial.
Like previous entries in the Defy Revival series, Zenith fits the Defy Revival A3648 with the in-house Elite 670 automatic movement. The Elite 670 may lack some of the horological spectacle of some of Zenith’s more complex offerings, but the base platform here is dependable, high-performing, and genuinely attractive. Zenith rates the movement for a decent 50 hours of power reserve at a 28,800 bph beat rate, but it’s the finishing that steals the show in person. The circular Côtes de Genève across the bridges offer impressive visual depth, and when paired to the tight perlage on the mainplate, the Elite 670 catches light from nearly any angle.
Rather than the distinctive ladder bracelet design that has defined previous Defy Revival releases to this point, Zenith instead pairs the Defy Revival A3648 with an equally offbeat five-link bracelet in stainless steel. At first glance, this bracelet almost looks like a traditional three-link oyster-style bracelet with polished accents on the endlinks, but this is a deceptively complex piece. The polished mid-links here are beads-of-rice style, with a pronounced lozenge shape that gives their high-polished surfaces an almost liquid feel in changing light. Zenith’s solid finishing work also extends to the more conventional center and outer links, with a smooth, even brushing.
Before 2024, it had been years since the world had seen a fully equipped, purpose-built dive watch from Zenith. In the wake of Watches and Wonders Geneva 2024, the brand has fully embraced its return to divers, and the new Zenith Defy Revival A3648 proves that Zenith’s classic late ‘60s diver designs can still stand as exemplary timepieces today. The Zenith Defy Revival A3648 is available now through authorized dealers. MSRP for this watch stands at $7,700 USD as of press time. For more information, please visit the brand’s website.
