Panerai’s New Dive Watch Blew My Mind. There’s Literally Nothing Else Like It

Eight years. Three patents. One incredible on-demand light system.

Published June 15, 2024

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Updated June 21, 2024

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I am what’s referred to in the watch business as a “lume junkie.” I love lume, but the dirty truth is, it’s never quite as good as I want it to be. Even on the best-lumed watches, the lume either isn’t as bright as I’d like, it fades too quickly or it’s not as legible as it should be.

By far, the most common type of lume in use today is luminous paint such as Swiss-made Super-LumiNova or Seiko’s LumiBrite. This type of lume absorbs light, namely UV light, and stores it to be released in low light conditions. You can’t control it unless you bring around a mini UV flashlight everywhere you go. (To be clear, some watch nerds do this.)

There’s also tritium lume, which these days is only used in encapsulated gas form to keep its potentially dangerous radiation at bay. The benefit of tritium is it doesn’t fade like luminous paint and it doesn’t need to be charged — it’s always glowing. The downside is that it doesn’t glow as brightly as luminous paint, which is probably why just a handful of brands utilize it, most notably Ball and Luminox.

panerai watch glowing in the dark — Panerai just revolutionized the lume game.

Panerai makes some of the brightest-glowing watches out there, routinely applying ample amounts of Super-LumiNova to its watches’ trademark sandwich dials. But even Panerai’s lume suffers from the same drawbacks as everyone else’s.

To alleviate this concern, the brand has created an entirely new type of luminous watch with its the PAM01800, AKA the Submersible Elux LAB-ID. Panerai lent me a prototype of the watch to test out, and it absolutely blew my mind.

Panerai Submersible Elux LAB-ID

$96,300 at Panerai

Light from Mechanical Energy

Like many enthusiasts around my age, I first got into watches because of the Omega Seamaster James Bond wore in the 1990s. Not only did the watch look cool, but it was loaded with cool gadgets like a laser, a detonator and, in The World Is Not Enough, an on-demand illuminator.

The Panerai Submersible Elux LAB-ID is the closest thing I’ve seen to a James Bond gadget in real life, full stop.

In the most basic terms, the watch’s mechanical movement stores energy and converts it into electricity that is used to create light on demand.

This watch is the closest thing I’ve seen to a James Bond gadget in real life, full stop.

In more technical terms, the Elux Power Light system — which took Panerai’s Laboratorio di Idee eight years and three patents to develop — works like this:

Four barrels in the movement are dedicated to energy storage and unwind into an 8mm x 2.3mm microgenerator that converts mechanical energy into electricity. The generator contains custom-made coils, magnets and a stator but features no active electronics or batteries; it generates electricity through the use of a rotor operating at 80 revolutions per second to generate an electrical signal of 240 Hz.

panerai dive watch on denim — The Elux pusher activates the Power Light system and has its own dedicated flip-up protector.

That electrical signal powers LEDs in the dial, the hands and even in the bezel, all of which are activated by pressing a pusher at 8 o’clock.

Again, this watch stores mechanical energy and converts it into electrical light at the push of a button. There are no batteries involved whatsoever.

Wearing the Submersible Elux LAB-ID

So, what’s it like to wear a watch with a built-in on-demand lighting system? As it turns out, pretty awesome.

Turning on the light system is a tactile joy. You flick up the Elux-labeled pusher protector, press the very mechanical-feeling button, and the dial instantly lights up. Press it again, and it shuts off. It’s basically a light switch. On a watch.

All indices light up when activated, along with the large hour and minute hands. The outline of the small seconds counter at 9 o’clock also glows, as does the pip on the unidirectional bezel. Finally, there’s a linear power reserve indicator for the light that also illuminates. It looks like a life meter in a fighting game and tells you at a glance how much light you’ve got left.

A little Panerai ASMR.

The light put out by the watch is bright. Very bright. Panerai says it’s ten times brighter than an incandescent light bulb, and I found it to be far brighter than the lume I’ve encountered on any other watch, even full-lume dials.

The Elux illumination is so bright that I even experimented using the watch as a makeshift flashlight, walking around my apartment in total darkness with only the watch to light my way. I won’t go so far to say it works as a flashlight — it definitely does not — but I was able to use it like a candle to locate door handles and even read in the dark, which I found endlessly entertaining.

Panerai says the illumination on the Submersible Elux LAB-ID lasts for 30 minutes when fully charged, but on my prototype, I was able to get a solid 45 minutes. To fill up your energy stores, all you have to do is wind the crown, which is accessed underneath the signature Panerai crown protector.

This Is a Legit Diver, Not a Gimmick

Given that this watch contains a mini generator within its movement and an electrical light system under its bezel, you may think it’s sort of a delicate flower. A showpiece for some cool tech that can’t really be used like a real tool watch.

This couldn’t be further from the truth.

The Submersible Elux LAB-ID is 100 percent a Panerai. The watch is an absolute beast, even by the brand’s oversized standards. It measures 49mm across (without the crown) and a whopping 21.6mm thick.

It has an impressive water resistance of 500m and its case and bezel are made from Ti-Ceramitech, Panerai’s new ceramized titanium material that’s 44 percent lighter than stainless steel and ten times harder than ceramic. The material debuted just two months ago at Watches and Wonders.

The watch’s rubber strap is very soft and supple, allowing it to wear pretty comfortably despite its massive size and considerable weight. Ti-Ceramitech is a lightweight material, but there’s a lot of real estate here and a lot going on under the hood, so the watch is pretty heavy.

The bezel action on the 60-click, unidirectional bezel is snappy and satisfying, but if I may nitpick, the one flaw I noticed was on the bezel.

There are 60 LEDs located underneath the bezel, lining up with each stop on the bezel to show through the transparent pip. Panerai says only the 15 closest to the pip light up at a time in order to conserve energy. This is an impressive achievement, for sure, but was inconsistent in my experience.

Some spots on the bezel were decidedly brighter than others, with some almost appearing as dead spots. This would cause the bezel to flicker when I turned it, which admittedly put out a steampunk vibe that I kind of dug but also seemed like a flaw. The bezel light was also the first to go when the light power was running low.

However, my example was a prototype, so it’s entirely possible Panerai has the bezel lighting sorted out on the production models.

panerai dive watch glows on denim — With the Power Light bar empty, the dial and hands still have a few minutes of juice left, but the bezel’s light has gone out.

The watch is powered by a special version of Panerai’s in-house automatic Caliber P.9010 movement called the P.9010/EL. It has two mainspring barrels (in addition to the four barrels for the light system) providing a full three days of power reserve.

The movement also features an hour hand that can be adjusted independently without stopping the running seconds, making the watch ideal for changing time zones while traveling. Finally, the movement features hacking seconds when you pull the crown out all the way.

Mind Blown, Wallet Busted

I loved the limited time I got to spend with the Panerai Submersible Elux LAB-ID. My first time flicking up the pusher protector and pressing the Power Light pusher to light up the watch made me giggle like an idiot. Using the watch’s light system never failed to put a smile on my face from that point forward, and it’s hard for me to remember the last time I had so much fun with a watch.

But while my time with the watch was an absolute blast, it was also fleeting. This is not a watch that I will ever own, for a few reasons. First of all is its size. It truly is massive, and while I didn’t necessarily find it uncomfortable to wear — it actually wears pretty well for its enormity — it looked absolutely ridiculous on my 6.25-inch wrist.

Yeah … I’m not pulling this off.

But even if I were to get over the size issue — which given my love for the gadgetry of the watch, I seriously might — I could never afford it. The Submersible Elux LAB-ID is priced just shy of six figures at $96,300. It’s by far the most valuable watch I’ve ever had in my home, and I was sweating bullets when I dropped it off at my local FedEx to return it to Panerai.

The PAM01800 is also an exceptionally rare watch. The first Submersible Elux LAB-IDs will make their way to wrists this October, with Panerai planning only 150 examples of the watch in total, to be released in batches of 50 over the next three years.

I won’t be getting one, obviously, but if I were loaded and had tree-trunk wrists, I absolutely would.

Panerai Submersible Elux LAB-ID

A breakthrough innovation in the world of mechanical watches, Panerai’s 500m-capable dive watch in Ti-Ceramitech features a tiny generator inside its movement that transforms stored mechanical energy into electrical light, giving you lasting ultra-bright illumination at the press of a button.