Vostok Amphibia SE 020B33

The Vostok Amphibia SE 020B33 was released in Spring 2018. There were three variants – the SE 020B33 (the watch described here), the SE 020B34 with a white dial and the  with a black dial. All are fitted with Vostok’s 2416B, 31 jewel automatic movement. I chose the yellow dialled version, quite simply because I thought it looked the coolest and I don’t have a yellow dialled watch in my collection.

The stainless steel case has a width of 41 mm excluding crown, it is 48 mm lug to lug and has a lug width of 20 mm. The case depth is approximately 15 mm. The stainless steel case back is decorated with the classic Vostok “scuba dude”. I don’t think there has ever been “standard” 020 Amphibia but the 020 SE case is about the same size as the 670 case, which is slightly resembles, albeit with more rounded edges and curves. The case is brushed all round a matt finish. The crystal is the normal plexiglas / acrylic type and the crown is stainless steel with the Boctok “B” logo.

The dial is a pretty yellow colour (I would describe it as banana yellow) with an attractive matt finish. It features 12 raised hour indices which are stainless steel with a line of lume down the centre of the marker – the indices look black in most lights, they’re not. The dial features the words “Boctok” below the 12 o’clock marker, the Cyrillic words for 31 jewels, automatic and 200m above the 6 o’clock marker and made in Russia (сделано в России) at the very bottom edge of the dial. Apart from this it is a fairly plain dial with black minute markers around the edge. There a date window at 3 o’clock with steel surround and white date wheel. The hand set is the standard Amphibia arrow set which Meranom describes as “gun plated”. On closer inspection I would say that the hour indices and the hands are finished in a dark grey colour, rather than plain stainless steel, perhaps “gun metal” grey. Like the hour markers, the hour, minute and second hand looks darker than they really are.

Edit 19/04/18: After I published this I had a message from Dmitry at Meranom about the hands. The hands have much improved lume and the hour and minute had are longer than the standard Amphibia hand set. Dmitry also pointed out that the minute hand is wider than hour hand. Dmitry, who I believe is a designer at Vostok, describes this as the “designer’s touch”. Both the length and the extra width is noticeable if one looks closely enough, which I obviously didn’t originally notice!

The biggest upgrade here from a standard Amphibia is the bezel. The Vostok Amphibia SE 020B33 features a stainless steel uindirectional bezel with 60 clicks per revolution and a nice feel to it. The bezel insert is anodised aluminium, a fairly standard black diver’s insert with a nice big lume pip, grey numbers and marking which match the matt case. The bezel’s matt finish add a certain elan and I think it looks pretty cool. I did read in the forums that some people were disappointed with the bezel finish – it turns out that they did not realise it was shipped with a protective plastic covering. Something to check next time!

A quick word about the strap. I’m going to call it a rally diver strap. It is a silicon watch strap with antidust treatment (they still seem to attract plenty of dust to me!) and I find it to be quite a comfortable strap, I normally don’t change these over. The buckle on this strap is a nice upgrade though – it has a matt finish to match the case and is much chunkier than previous buckles I have seen. A definite improvement.

There were some other special edition 020s released in autumn 2016 that were green, red, blue and black. I picked up the green one. These featured colour matching dials, bezel inserts and straps, polished case finish and non standard Amphibia hands. The key difference between the 2016 and 2018 appear to be that the 2018 releases have matt finish (dial and case), there is a matching matt buckle and matt bezel. There were some quality issues with the 2016 release, with the bezel not lining up properly. The 2018 release appears to be finished to a much higher quality in general. The 2016 SE 020 releases did feature a display case back. I am not a massive fan, so no big deal to me that this watch doesn’t have one. Overall, with the yellow dial and black bezel, this is reminds me of the Seiko SKXA35, another cool looking diver’s watch that seems to be nicknamed the Yellowface, Bumblebee or Rising Sun.

When I bought the watch from Meranom, I noticed there was also a replacement yellow bezel available which fits the 020 (Bezel 02/20/30/40 yellow), which I could not resist.

There is a short video of the watch at Meranom’s YouTube channel.

Price at purchase $140.