Some watches grab me immediately because of the way they look. Others impress because of the movement inside, their history, or simply because they come from a manufacture we’ve all learned to respect. And then there are watches like the MING 57.05 Comet, which interest me for an entirely different reason: they introduce an idea so simple that you start wondering why we’ve been doing things differently for so long.
That’s exactly what happened when I understood how MING approached Daylight Saving Time in its new worldtimer. At first, it seems like a minor detail. But the more I thought about it, the stranger the situation became. For decades, we’ve celebrated the worldtimer as one of watchmaking’s great complications for travelers, capable of putting time around the globe onto a single dial. There are extraordinary examples from Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin, IWC and many others. And yet, the world those watches represent doesn’t quite behave the way it appears on their dials.
The world was never that tidy
The architecture of the modern worldtimer is closely associated with Louis Cottier’s work during the 1930s. The principle remains brilliant: a 24-hour scale paired with representative cities allows multiple time zones to be read simultaneously. It’s elegant, intuitive and probably one of mechanical watchmaking’s most romantic representations of a connected world.
The problem begins when Daylight Saving Time (DST) enters the picture. New York can move its clocks forward while Tokyo stays exactly where it is; Europe and the United States don’t even always make their seasonal changes on the same dates, while some countries have abandoned the system entirely. During certain parts of the year, a conventional worldtimer can therefore require its owner to remember which cities need an additional correction.
I don’t consider this a serious flaw. Nobody needs a mechanical watch today to know the time in Tokyo. But once someone points out the limitation, it becomes difficult to stop seeing it. And that is exactly what MING did.
A surprisingly simple solution
This is the part of the 57.05 Comet I really like. MING separated the cities that observe Daylight Saving Time from those that don’t. Cities that remain constant sit on a fixed inner ring, while those affected by DST appear on a separate outer bezel. When the seasonal change arrives, the owner turns that bezel one 15-degree click, shifting only the affected cities by one hour.
When I understood the system, my immediate reaction was to wonder how something so obvious hadn’t become a common solution before. We live in an industry where the word innovation is constantly attached to more components, new materials and increasingly complicated calibers. Sometimes the word is entirely justified; other times, there’s considerably more marketing than revolution involved.
The Comet gave me the opposite feeling. Its idea is interesting precisely because it looks simple once you’ve seen it. Then I started digging deeper and discovered something that changed my initial impression: MING wasn’t the first to tackle this problem.
Then I found the Bovet
In 2024, Bovet introduced the Récital 28 Prowess 1, an extraordinarily sophisticated mechanical response to Daylight Saving Time. Its movement uses 744 components and a system of 24 rollers capable of displaying different time configurations, even accounting for the differences between American and European DST periods.
That exposes one of the MING’s limitations: not every region enters and leaves Daylight Saving Time simultaneously. Bovet attempts to represent that complexity in a way the Comet simply cannot. Saying that MING was the first to “solve” DST would therefore be incorrect.
Strangely enough, discovering the Bovet made the Comet even more interesting to me. We’re looking at two completely different philosophies applied to essentially the same problem. Bovet built a 744-component machine measuring 46.3 mm and costing around CHF 650,000 to represent the complexity of the international time system with remarkable fidelity. MING decided to put the cities that change time on a separate bezel.
It makes little sense to say that one solution is better than the other. Technically, the Bovet can do things the MING cannot. But as a design exercise, I find the contrast fascinating: one solution attempts to master complexity while the other attempts to reduce it.
When did we decide more complicated means better?
I love haute horlogerie. Part of what makes this world fascinating is looking at a perpetual calendar, minute repeater or tourbillon and wondering how someone managed to solve something so complicated using mechanical components. But that fascination has also conditioned us to associate complexity with importance.
The MING reminded me that there’s another way to think. If a problem can be solved with hundreds of components, that demonstrates just how far mechanical engineering can go. But if a meaningful part of that same problem can be addressed by intelligently reorganizing a bezel, I also want to pay attention to the person who asked that question.
Perhaps innovation doesn’t always mean asking what else we can add. Sometimes it means asking what we can remove without losing what actually matters.
It isn’t perfect — and that’s fine
The 57.05 Comet doesn’t magically turn the worldtimer into a perfect representation of global time either. Some time zones use 30- or 45-minute offsets, DST transition dates vary between regions, and the rules themselves can change through government decisions. This is precisely where the Bovet’s extraordinary architecture demonstrates what a simpler solution like MING’s must sacrifice.
But I don’t think that undermines the Comet’s argument. We’re talking about mechanical watchmaking; if absolute precision and efficiency were our only measures, a smartphone would have ended this conversation a long time ago. What I want from a good complication is for it to make sense, to be thoughtfully designed and, occasionally, to show me a different way of solving something I thought I already understood.
The watch behind the idea
The MING 57.05 Comet comes in a stainless-steel case measuring 40 mm in diameter and 10.33 mm thick, with 100 meters of water resistance. Inside is the automatic Sellita for MING 330.M2, offering approximately 50 hours of power reserve.
Those specifications are perfectly fine, but they’re not why we’re talking about this watch. The multilayer blue dial uses overlapping structures to create shifting patterns as the viewing angle changes, an effect MING calls the “Comet Tail.” The 24-hour scale uses Super-LumiNova X1 to distinguish day from night, while a dedicated indication shows when DST is active.
Even the name makes sense. MING connects the watch to the de Havilland Comet, the world’s first commercial jet airliner, from an era when rapid intercontinental travel began turning time-zone differences into an everyday problem. It’s brand storytelling, obviously, but this time the story fits the watch rather well.
RAW TIME VERDICT
After looking deeper into the 57.05 Comet, I think we can absolutely talk about innovation — just not because MING was first. In fact, discovering that it wasn’t made the story more interesting. Bovet demonstrated how far the problem can be taken mechanically when complexity is barely a constraint; MING explored how much of that same problem could be addressed with a considerably simpler idea.
And that’s when I understood why I like this watch. I don’t need every launch to change the industry, and I certainly don’t need every new reference to arrive accompanied by the word revolutionary. After enough years following watches, you develop a certain resistance to that vocabulary. What I do want are watches that make me stop, investigate and look again at something I thought I understood.
The MING 57.05 Comet did exactly that for me. Not because it definitively solved the worldtimer, but because it took a limitation we’ve accepted for decades and asked whether it really needed to work that way. Its answer is simple, imperfect and remarkably intelligent.
The Comet may not change the way worldtimers are built. But it changed, at least slightly, the way I look at them — and for a new watch, that’s already quite a lot.
— Mauricio Venegas
Founder & Editor, RAW TIME