This page asks you a question before it tells you anything, so answer it first: mesh or rubber. The bracelet is an option on this listing rather than a fixed part of the watch, which means the Seamaster Diver 300M 60 Years of James Bond leaves here as one of two quite different objects. The watch above the lugs does not change — 42 mm of steel, a steel bezel, a grey patterned dial — and everything about how it wears does. Decide the bracelet, then read the rest.

Mesh or Rubber: Decide First

The Omega Seamaster Diver 300M 60 Years of James Bond is offered here in two builds: a stainless steel Milanese mesh bracelet, or a rubber strap. One specification covers both, because the bracelet is the only line in the order that moves.

• Case and bezel: 42 mm stainless steel case, steel bezel
• Dial: grey, patterned
• Movement: genuine Omega calibre 8800, built here as VSF’s VS8800
• Power reserve: 48 hours. Water resistance: 300 m
• Reference: 210.30.42.20.06.002

With the watch head settled, the bracelet is the whole of the decision — and it is a real one, because the two builds hang differently, weigh differently and suit different weeks of the year. Neither is an upgrade on the other. They are two readings of one reference.

Configuration one: steel Milanese mesh

This is the build in the photographs, and the one most buyers come for. Milanese is woven, not linked: a dense steel mesh with no segment long enough to hold a shape of its own, so the band hangs from the lugs and settles into whatever the wrist gives it. It is also all steel, and you feel that — a 42 mm steel case on steel mesh is heavier in the hand than the specification suggests, and dressier than a dive watch has any right to be.

Configuration two: rubber strap

Rubber takes that weight straight back out. It is the sensible answer in heat and around water, and it returns the piece to the tool register the Diver 300M came from: the same case, sitting lower and asking less of the wrist.

The movement is the same underneath either choice, so this is a decision about how the watch wears and nothing else. If it is going to be worn to work and kept dry, take the mesh; if it is going on holiday, in and out of salt water, take the rubber and keep the mesh in mind for later.

A Patterned Grey Dial Under a Steel Bezel

The bezel is steel. Not blue ceramic, not black — steel, the same metal as the case, so the front of this watch is one continuous tone from the edge of the crystal to the end of the bracelet. That is unusual in the Diver 300M range, where the bezel is normally where the colour lives, and it is the single most deliberate thing about the design. Across a room this watch does not declare itself at all.

What carries it instead is the dial, which is grey and patterned rather than plain. A pattern does on a monochrome watch what colour does on a bright one: it gives the surface something to do in changing light, and it means a grey dial reads as a considered choice instead of an absence of one. Against a steel bezel the effect is quiet and fairly formal — closer to a steel sports watch than to a dive watch, which is why this reference tends to appeal to people who already own something with a coloured ceramic insert and want the opposite. A grey-dial Diver 300M sits next door on the .001 of this stem — the grey-dial Diver 300M clone — and the whole rest of the line is in the Omega Seamaster collection.

Sixty Years, One Anniversary Dial

Anniversary watches are usually ordinary watches with one special part, and this one is honest about which part that is. The 60 Years of James Bond is a Seamaster Diver 300M in every structural respect: standard 42 mm steel case, standard 300-metre rating, the standard 8800-generation movement. The anniversary lives on the dial and nowhere else. Understanding that is what stops you overpaying attention to the name — you are choosing a dial and a bracelet, not a different watch.

It also explains why this reference works as the quiet one in a collection. Everything the rest of the Diver 300M range uses to get itself noticed — a coloured bezel, a bright accent, a dial that photographs loud — is simply absent here, and what is left is an anniversary grey dial on woven steel. If you want a Diver 300M that can be worn to work without announcing itself, that is the reason to stop here, and the rubber option is there for the weeks when you would rather it weighed nothing. This is also the only reference that carries its anniversary on the dial rather than the caseback, which the seven Bond Seamasters compared goes through in order.