Before we get into my review of the Oris Big Crown Pointer Date Bullseye, let’s get some context about the brand out of the way. Oris traces its foundation to 1904, when two natives of the Swiss watchmaking town of Le Locle, Paul Cattin and Georges Christian, opened their watch factory in the German-speaking Swiss town of Hölstein. Cattin and Christian named their company “Oris” after the Orisbach tributary, a brook near the factory.A maker of pocket watches and, by 1925, the increasingly popular wristwatches, Oris enjoyed a long period of growth and expansion throughout the following decades and even made its own movements. Losing its independence during the consolidation years of the Quartz Crisis, Oris regained it in the 1980s, when a management buyout transformed the company and solidified its mission to make only mechanical watches going forward. Today, Oris is well established as a staple for value-conscious collectors of Swiss-made watches.
While much of its modern output is devoted to sport-oriented timepieces, like the popular Aquis and Divers (formerly Divers Sixty-Five) diving watches, the brand’s most recognizable and emblematic collection is the Big Crown Pointer Date, which has been a mainstay of the brand’s portfolio — and in constant production — since 1938. It was the first watch with a date indication displayed via a central hand on an outer scale, and it took the other part of its model name from its signature design element — an oversized crown that offered ease of use for its intended audience, pilots who wore thick gloves in the cockpit.The “Big Crown” designation has since migrated to other collections that don’t feature this rare, analog date function, but the 88-year-old original version still takes pride of place in Oris’ wide and versatile collection.
For the new “Bullseye” edition, a non-limited model that joined the family early in 2026, Oris reached back into its archives even further than the Big Crown’s debut year, to pocket watches with a black-and-white concentric-circle dial design (popularly nicknamed “Bulleye”) from brand catalogs dating to the 1910s. The new watch is the first example of such a two-tone, high-contrast dial (which some also call a “tuxedo” dial) from Oris since 1998. Here’s a closer look at it.
[toc-section heading=”Case, Bezel, & Crown”]
Appropriately enough for a timepiece clearly designed to evoke an earlier era — particularly the heyday of “:bullseye” dials from the 1940s to the 1970s— the case dimensions of this edition are on the modest side, measuring 38mm — 2mm smaller than most of the core models in the Big Crown Pointer Date series, which underwent its own soft revamp in 2025. The case sits 12.2mm high on the wrist, with a lug-to-lug span of 45.5mm. Like its predecessors, the case is easily identifiable by its signature aesthetic feature, a knurled, coin-edge treatment on the bezel, a motif that not only grounds this watch in its vintage-evocative identity but also, subtly, calls to mind the look of jet turbines, a callback to the model’s early niche as a watch for aviators.
The crown, while not as “Big” as those on earlier models, still has a prominent protuberance and its own knurled edge for an easy grip. The crown screws in securely to seal the watch’s water resistance to 50 meters, and the crystal is double-domed and treated with antireflective coating on its underside for a clear view of the high-contrast dial.
[toc-section heading=”Dial & Hands”]
It is the “bullseye” dial, of course, that takes center stage in this horological ensemble. It adapts the distinctive Pointer Date layout in a sectored, bicolor combination that somehow succeeds in perfectly balancing formality and fun. The colors are predominantly a very light cool gray (almost approaching an off-white) for the outer 31-day calendar sector and the central circle, and a piano black for the 12-hour ring, with large, legible Arabic numerals in contrasting white. Red details punctuate the dial for an added dash of splash, like the red text for the date numerals on the dial’s perimeter and the half-moon-shaped tip of the central date-pointer hand. The main handset consists of hours and minutes in a classical cathedral configuration — another nod to this watch’s early 20th-Century heritage — and a thin javelin for the sweeping seconds. Dividing the red-printed calendar scale from the black hour ring is another retro-cool element, a railroad-style minute track with intermittent wedge-shaped black markers aligning with the hour numerals.
[toc-section heading=”Caliber 754 Movement”]
Oris has opted to equip the Big Crown Pointer Date “Bullseye” with the self-winding Caliber 754, which, as savvy watch enthusiasts are aware, is an Oris-customized version of the ubiquitous and reliable Sellita SW200-1. On display behind the sapphire caseback window, it bears the bright red rotor that has long been a hallmark of Oris movements. Perhaps ironically, the red rotor is now shorthand for an outsourced base caliber, as Oris doesn’t outfit its own in-house-made 400 series of movements — introduced in 2020 and not utilized here — with this identifying element. Nevertheless, this Sellits movement is popular among watchmakers for a reason, and its attributes are on display in this watch: bidirectional winding, Incabloc anti-shock protection, hacking seconds, a brisk 28,800-vph frequency, 26 jewels, and a sturdy albeit middling power reserve of 41 hours, which is slightly bumped up from the 38 hours claimed by Sellita for the base movement.
[toc-section heading=”Strap, Clasp, and Pricing”]
The black Cervo Volante leather strap will look (and feel) familiar to many Oris fans, especially those who applaud the Swiss watchmaker’s sustainability initiatives. Debuting on a crowd-pleasing aqua-dialed edition of the Big Crown Pointer Date in xxxx, this strap style emerged from a collaboration between Oris and Cervo Volante, a Swiss leather goods manufacturer that uses sustainable deer-skin leather, which would otherwise be discarded, in its footwear and accessories.The strap nestles into the 20mm space between the case’s lugs and is equipped with a quick-change system. The price of the Oris Big Crown Pointer Date “Bullseye” is $2,350. To be clear, you don’t need to wear this watch with a tuxedo. But if you are putting on a tuxedo, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more appropriate watch to reach for to complete the outfit. You can learn more at oris.ch
