De Bethune DB25 Digitale shrinks to 42mm with a new minute display
The jumping hour moon watch moves to a 42mm titanium case with fixed lugs, a new minute aperture and the third generation of the DB2144 calibre.
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De Bethune has introduced the DB25 Digitale, a jumping hour watch with a moon indication. It joins the permanent collection and follows the DB28 Digitale, which had a 45mm case.
The case is now 42mm in polished grade 5 titanium and 11.9mm thick. It takes the shorter, fixed, openworked bullet lugs of the DB25 platform instead of the DB28’s floating lugs, which makes the watch more dressy than the previous Digitale. The jumping hour window and the moon indication stay where they were, but the minutes are now read through an arched aperture at 6 o’clock.
The dial is built from 82 elements. A spherical moon in palladium and flame-blued steel sits among blued titanium star discs carrying grey-gold stars, with a wave-like random guilloché in blued titanium. Starry Skys and Starry Seas finishing are combined with the guilloché, and the De Bethune logo is connected to the ring that separates the starlit sky from the moon river.
Inside is the third generation of the hand-wound in-house calibre, now named Calibre DB2144V3. It beats at 4Hz, uses a self-regulating twin-barrel system and has a 5-day power reserve. The mainplate is concave titanium and the barrel bridge is deltoid-shaped. For the first time, a random guilloché motif appears on a blued titanium plate. The deltoid bridge, in Starry Seas random guilloché finishing, can be seen through the exhibition caseback.
The watch comes on an alligator leather strap at CHF 106,000 excluding taxes. The DB28 Digitale was priced at CHF 95,000 excluding taxes in 2014.