Amfibia Vostok Amphibia Scuba 2416/070799

Completing my 2018 Vostok Amfibia purchases (so far!), alongside the Reef and the Red Sea, is the Amfibia Vostok Amphibia Scuba 2416/070799. The other two 2018 Amfibia releases that I have not bought are the new releases of the Amfibia Turbina and the Black Sea. I don’t mind the design of the Black Sea but I really struggle to find much about the Turbina appealing, so I guess I won’t be picking up either of these unless I find them cheap and second hand somewhere.

The 2018 Vostok Amfibia Scuba releases were available in 3 models, the key design points being:

Amphibia Scuba 2415/070798 – Stainless steel finish, black dial, no date window and Vostok 2415 movement

Amphibia Scuba 2416/070799 – Stainless steel finish, white dial with date window and Vostok 2416 movement – the watch I review here

Amphibia Scuba 2416/076800 – Stainless steel PVD coated finish, black dial with dare window and Vostok 2416 movement

The Amfibia Scuba is probably the quirkiest of the new Amfibia designs. It is a pretty big watch, although not as large and imposing looking as the Red Sea. As usual, it was a tough decision picking which watch to go for. I discounted the PVD finished watch as I have never really been a fan of PVD coating, I was put off by a PVD coated Christopher Ward watch I bought that lost some of its coating in places and began to untidy pretty quickly. So it was really a choice between a white or black dial. In the end I opted for the white dialed model and I think it looks a bit cleaner than the 070798 dial. They all feature a black, orange and white colour scheme and identical straps.

The Amfiba Scuba appears to be roughly the same size as the modern Vostok Amphibia 090s, but it is deeper and much more solid. The case is 41 mm in diameter without crown, approximately 49 mm lug to lug, lug width is 20 mm and the depth is about 13 mm. The case is brushed stainless steel with a raised bezel area around the crystal. This appears to be held in place by four hex head screws, but these are purely decorative and the case is all one piece. The case back appears to be a standard Amfibia case back and looks the same as the one on the Reef and the Red Sea. The crystal is a a lightly convex mineral glass. The strap is a quite soft, stretchy black rubber diving strap. It features “Amfibia” branding hole side and the Amfibia wavy logo on the buckle side. The stainless buckle is a pretty common shape and is branded with the word “Amfibia”. It is actually a pretty comfortable strap and I don’t feel the need to immediately replace it. It is, however, an absolute dust magnet.

As you can see from the pictures, the Amfibia Scuba features two screw down crowns, one situated at approximately 2 o’clock and one at approximately 4 o’clock. The crown at 2 o’clock is for setting the time and date and is decorated with the wavy Amfibia logo. The crown at 4 o’clock is for moving the internal rotating bezel and, although it appears the same as the crown for setting the time, it doesn’t have the Amfibia logo.

The model here is the Amfibia Scuba 070799 which has a nice, clean white face. The dial is easy to read with simple 60 minute markers and white raised hour indices. The indices are fully lumed with SuperLuminova and their inner point shape echoes the design of the pointed end of the hands. The dial features “Amfibia Automatic” below the 12 o’clock in black, Scuba 200m in orange above the 6 o’clock and “Made In Russia” in black at the very bottom of the dial. The dial has an interesting date window at 3 o’clock. It is a large date window which allows both today, yesterday and tomorrow’s dates in white on a black date wheel to be visible at any one time. The bi-directional internal rotating bezel is fairly simple and white-coloured with simple black minute indices and numerals marking 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50. There is an inverted lumed triangle to mark the 0 point. The hands are an interesting design. There is a relatively simple orange needle-type second hand but the hour and minute hands have quite an unusual semi skeleton design. I can’t find a name for the design but I would describe them as kind of dauphine type hands with the both ends trimmed off (the most similar I have seen are on the Anonimo Marlin). The hands have black outline and are lumed until about half way down leaving the semi skeleton towards the centre. All three hand extend to nicely to the indices making the time nice and easy to read.

The external bezel remains the more common type of bezel for diving watch and predates the internal bezel design, they are both used in the same way, to keep track of the length of a dive. Internal bezels began to appear on divers watches in the 1960s and it is Aquastar who lay claim to producing the first diver’s watch featuring an internal bezel with the launch of their Aquastar 63 model. Of course, there are various pros and cons to the internal bezel. The one major advantage that the internal bezel has over the external bezel is that once it is set and the crown is screwed down it is not going to move, get accidentally knocked or caught on something. The major disadvantage is that a second crown means that you are adding another possible hole for water ingress, although some designs have a single crown to set the time and the internal bezel. Arguably an internal bezel crown it is a lot more fiddly and difficult than moving an external bezel with a good shark’s tooth grip, particularly if one is wearing gloves.

Old Versus New

The 2018 Amfibia Scuba has radical differences from the earlier Scuba design and it is best easier to show a picture to show this. Watchuseek F10 member mariomart kindly gave me his permission to reproduce this photograph of the old and new side by side.

As you can see the watch case shape remains broadly similar but the major difference is that the crown positions have been moved. On the old model the crowns are located at 3 and 9 o’clock. The case for the 2018 model seems a little more rounded and streamline with less angles, the positions of the decorative screws have been moved in and are hex type instead of the old slot type. The hands are more pointy and solid in the old model, the date window has moved and the raised indices on the 2018 model are a big improvement to the dial. What I do like on the older model is the way the rubber strap fits tightly up against the case, something I think might improve the look of the new model. In general I think the 2018 model looks more modern and the older model actually looks vintage, quite 1970s.

So there you have it. The Vostok Amfibia Scuba is really growing on me. I am actually considering buying the 070798 with the black dial too! It is fairly large on my 7.5 inch wrist, but not too large. I can’t imagine wearing a much larger watch though.

The original price at release for the 2018 Amfibia Scubas was around $200 . I purchased mine from komandirskie.com.