Bertucci is a brand with a very specific niche: they make high performance, value oriented, field watches. And I don?t mean that they interpret other watch styles through the lens of a field watch. They just make field watches. Scrolling through the watches available on their website is almost hypnotic, as you pass field watch after field watch, in a range of styles and dial configurations, but always adhering to the basic tenets of what makes a field watch a field watch. And the watches are affordable, with many examples coming in under $100, and none topping $500. Bertucci has always struck me as a brand with a lot of charm due to their sharp focus and value proposition. You can imagine both seasoned watch collecting veterans and newcomers getting something useful out of a Bertucci watch – it?s both an insider?s brand, and one that welcomes everybody. Their new watch, the A-2RA Retroform, has many elements of a classic field watch, but boasts a variety of upgrades that make it a solid and rugged choice.
True to form, what we have here is relatively simple at a high level – this is the nature of a field watch. It has a 40mm case (on the large side by field watch standards) with a highly legible black dial marked by crisp white Arabic numerals – a twelve hour track around the outer perimeter and a 12 through 24 hour scale inside of it. The minutes track is made up of open hash marks, punctuated by triangular lumed markers at the hours, which is v...