D5 Black/Green

The D5 is Suunto's answer to a specific complaint: that dive computers you can wear as a watch either cost as much as a regulator set or cannot talk to a tank transmitter. It is 53 mm across and 90 g (3.2 oz), it takes standard interchangeable straps, and it reads up to three Suunto Tank POD transmitters at once.

Underneath it runs Suunto Fused RGBM 2, which is more conservative than Buhlmann with liberal gradient factors and noticeably more forgiving than the original RGBM that gave older Suuntos their reputation for cutting bottom time short. If your buddy dives a Shearwater and you dive a D5, expect to be the one calling the ascent. Whether that is a flaw or a feature is a conversation older than either computer.

Five modes cover air, nitrox, freediving, gauge and off. The compass is a real tilt-compensated digital compass rather than a bearing indicator, which matters more in the Red Sea than people expect, because half the good sites are navigated off a single reef wall and the other half are blue-water drop-offs where the boat is a compass heading and nothing else.

The one thing to know is that the box does not include a watch strap in the dressier sense: it ships on silicone with a USB charging cable, and the charger is a proprietary magnetic clip, so it goes in the same pocket as the computer or it stays home.