There's no denying that this is a beautiful piece of machinery. From its nicely-milled and ratcheted outer ring to the tiny machine screws mounting the band, it shouts its complexity.  Any person with a respect for good mechanical engineering will enjoy turning this over in the hand.

While you could certainly dive with this watch, it's not really a dive watch.  It has some attributes of a dive watch--the outer timing band and heavy casing--but it makes no claim to meet the stringent ISO 6425 standard of the real thing.  [UPDATE: A representative from the company says they meet the standard, although there is no indication of that on the body of the watch or in the accompanying literature] The claimed depth of 500 meters is unlikely to be reached unless something goes terribly wrong on that retirement cruise.  I did plop the watch into a tub of water for an hour.  I saw no indication of leakage--no clouding of the crystal.  I have no reason to doubt that the watch will hold up under typical casual depths.  What the watch is REALLY for is the hotel bar.  This is immediately clear when visiting the Invicta website.  Bikini models abound, but I found no traces of an actual diver.

You will pay a price for being seen wearing this watch, and that price is comfort.  My perfectly-serviceable Casio weighs just over an ounce.  The Invicta weighs just under ten.  Along the axis of the arm, it's two and a quarter inches long and it's nearly an inch thick.  You will not forget that you're wearing it.  I'm a pretty robust individual and I'm eager to get it off after an hour.

How does it work as a watch? It will take a while to figure it out, since the presentation box contains only a generic user guide.  Surely a premium watch should come with a dedicated manual.  The stopwatch function is nice, showing seconds, tenths and accumulated hours.  Readability is hindered by too-busy artwork on the dial.  As far as accuracy goes,  I'm conducting a shoot-out. I set my Casio and the Invicta to a network time source and will check them against that source after a few weeks have passed.  I'll update this review at that time.  I can say that I've noticed a slight irregularity of just over one second in the hours since I set the watch.  This may be periodic error (a function of the geometry of some parts) and it may not accumulate.  Time will tell.

Update:  I gave it six weeks and then checked both watches (Invicta and inexpensive Casio) against the same internet time server I'd used to set up the experiment.  The Casio had gained 5 seconds.  The Invicta had gained 15.  Not that it matters that much: after all the Invicta is about the look and time is purely secondary.