Tudor‘s field watch had disappeared. Quietly discontinued in 2020, fans hoped the Ranger would return with some pretty specific updates, and today they got exactly what they wanted. The Tudor Ranger is back, and it looks better than ever at 39mm, with an in-house automatic movement and tantalizing starting price of $2,725.
The Ranger has existed in the Tudor catalog in some form for decades. It’s the brand’s dedicated field and adventure watch. Although it’s very much got its own personality, many will inevitably compare it to the Rolex Explorer because, you know, Tudor is owned by Rolex. We say it fully stands on its own.
It’s tough to know if the watch collecting world is generally prescient or if Tudor was listening closely to its fans. Probably both. Released in 2014, the previous version of this field watch was called the Heritage Ranger, and it measured 41mm wide and ran on a sourced ETA movement. When it quietly vanished from the catalog in 2020, fans didn’t really believe it was gone for good. They guessed the brand would bring it back, and they hoped for a couple things: namely, exactly the size and movement updates it got for 2022. But it’s not as if everyone saw this particular release coming.
That’s because there’s more to the Ranger’s story and this particular release. It comes on the anniversary of the 1952 British North Greenland Expedition for which 25 polar explorers and scientists were issued Tudor Oyster Prince watches. The expedition has been part of Tudor marketing lore ever since, and it was notably the impetus for another now discontinued watch, the North Flag — in part based on a watch from the 1970s called the Ranger II.
So, Tudor once again did a good job of surprising and delighting its audience. Though the new Tudor Ranger is visually familiar, it combines the look that made its predecessor popular with a size that’ll be widely appreciated. Watches are trending smaller these days, and it’s safe to say that 39mm is a broadly agreed upon sweet spot.
That makes the Ranger all-around more wearable and in line with its field watch character (field watches feel most authentic when they wear smallish — the issued Oyster Prince watches measuring only 34mm), but it’s the combination of an in-house movement and very reasonable price that drive the excitement home. The MT5402 movement has a 70-hour power reserve, is COSC chronometer-certified and it’s the same movement that’s found in another favorite from Tudor, the Black Bay Fifty-Eight dive watch.
