Floating Porcelain Dial 16520 Rolex Daytona

In the world of Zenith Daytona, nearly all collectors concur that the most desirable out there have one thing: a floating Cosmograph line. The first of anything in vintage Rolex tends to be a bit different, not just because it was the first but because Rolex were still figuring things out quickly and so they tend to look a bit different. The Daytona had become undesirable and a stagnant seller by the year 1988, a manual wind Oyster case in a world that was self-winding. What the Daytona required was radical rethink, which is precisely what it received. What resulted is one of the most cemented pieces of modern watch design. While any 16520 is an object of beauty, the earliest production dials feature a Cosmograph line of text much lower down than latter iterations and a different dial construction known by collectors as the porcelain dial.

Photography for this Find is supplemented with a prior sale by Phillips. The watch in the header image is the example on offer today. 

These dials with a space above Cosmograph go by Mk1, porcelain, or floating Cosmograph (for obvious reasons). Thought it should be noted that not all floating dials are porcelain. Not even all white floating Cosmograph dials are porcelain construction. The printed texts here have a 3D depth, where their shadow is visible under a layer of gloss sheen. The dial construction of these early watches differs from latter iterations, where there’s a lacquer layer below the text that creates this. In addition, these watches used a slightly different bezel graduated from 50 to 200 units, with 200 just under 3. Later bezels graduated up to 400. These dials were only in production for just over a year. This or in gold is something of the ultimate Zenith, barring 16528s, Patrizzis, or the ‘Chairman’.

Porcelain Daytonas command a premium of something like double their non-milky peers. More than that if you take floating out of the equation. Frankly, they’re getting harder to find because values have started moving. Values under 200k might seem wild for a humble steel chronograph, but consider that production values are likely just 100-200 of dials. And for a Daytona that’s nothing. Zenith Daytona is from an entirely different Rolex, akin to Lemania Patek; and both are an apex of their own. And it’s the charms, the quirks, that make both so special.

This example appears to have an excellent case, full bracelet, and dial unblemished. This one hails from year of introduction, 1988. It comes with the complete kit out of Dubai.