The Panerai Luminor 1950 3 Days GMT, inspired by a vintage watch used by the Italian navy, features the brand?s P.9001 in-house movement. WatchTime put both wristwatch and caliber to the test in this feature from the WatchTime archives. Scroll down for the full report, accompanied by Nik Schölzel’s stunning original photos.
Caliber family P.9000, which debuted in 2009, is the second line of in-house movements developed by Panerai. Though their power reserve is shorter (three rather than eight days), these offer the convenience of automatic winding at significantly less expense than their predecessors in the P.2000 family. Caliber P.2003, in fact, holds a full 10 days? worth of power, but the watch that it powers, the Panerai Luminor 1950 10 Days GMT, is nearly twice as expensive as the one we test here, the Luminor 1950 3 Days GMT. Despite its lower price tag, the 3 Days GMT provides almost everything the 10 Days offers: a second time zone (but without a day-night display for the 12-hour hand), a power-reserve display (but positioned on the back and nonlinear) and a return-to-zero mechanism for the seconds hand, which is triggered when you extract the crown into the hand-setting position. Along with Caliber P.9001, which powers the watch in this test, the family includes the basic P.9000 (with no second time zone or power-reserve display) and the P.9002 (with power-reserve display on the front).
Typical characteristics of this Swiss-made, Italian-designed brand inclu...