If you are just starting your horology journey, chances are that you will be buying a quartz watch. I am typing this Time-Piece while wearing a Casio quartz watch, incidentally the brand that made quartz a great hit, nearly killing the Swiss watch industry. However, the credit for inventing the first quartz watch goes to Seiko under its Astron line.
Vacheron
Constantin
Traditionnelle Twin Beat
Perpetual
Calendar
This is what Mondaine, the watchmaker whose watches adorn all Swiss railway stations says about how they work: “A quartz watch, or clock, is a timepiece that uses quartz crystal, a battery and an electronic oscillator. Any watch that uses quartz as part of the mechanism is classed as a quartz watch. A battery produces a current in the watch circuit, of which the quartz crystal is a part. This current causes the quartz to vibrate at precisely 32,768 times a second. The circuit counts to oscillations and turns each 32,768 vibrations into one electric pulse every second. The pulses drive a motor, which turns the hands of the watch.”
There are many advantages of quartz. It is cheap to produce, accurate to within one or two seconds per month without any need for winding, more or less impervious to changes in temperature and comfortable being kept unworn even for a year. And even after one year, it will still display the correct time, if the battery has not died in the meantime.
On the other hand, most automatic watches have a limited power reserve (generally up to 72 hours) and once it is depleted, the watch has to be sprung back into action, sometimes manually. However, some very expensive watches do have a power reserve lasting nearly two months – the Vacheron Constantin Traditionnelle Twin Beat Perpetual Calendar has a power reserve of 65 days. But you have to part with euro 520,000 for the privilege of wearing one.
Casio Edifice line
The advent of Quartz in the early 1970s very nearly killed the Swiss luxury watch industry, because the 1,600 Swiss brands could no longer compete with the cheaper quartz watches that were flooding the market. Inevitably, around 1,000 of these companies went bankrupt and only 600 remain to date, led by Rolex and Omega.
Today, even the biggest names in the Swiss watch industry make quartz watches in addition to their automatic/mechanical watches. Among them are Tissot, Longines, Hamilton, Certina and of course, Swatch which also collaborates with Omega and Blancpain to make affordable takes on the latter two brands, although the Blancpain version actually has an in-house ETA automatic movement, not a quartz one.
Rolex itself made quartz watches for some time under its OysterQuartz line, though now it is a fully automatic/mechanical watch manufacturer. These watches now command a premium in the second-hand (no pun intended) market. The popularity of Quartz watches has soared after manufacturers such as Citizen and Seiko made their movements available for third party manufacturers and micro brands.
There is nothing inherently wrong about choosing a quartz watch, whether it is for a Go Anywhere Do Anything (GADA) mission, an evening function or the swimming pool (make sure the watch is at least 100 m water resistant). They now come in a variety of styles – and some manufacturers even have quartz and mechanical versions of the same watch, with only the Reference Numbers and the price differentiating between the two.
Mondaine Quartz
It has taken a long time, but there is once again renewed interest in automatic and mechanical watches among mid-tier buyers. Some of these watches are just slightly more expensive than high-end quartz watches. Perhaps the biggest news in this regard is that Casio, the King of Analogue and Digital Quartz, is reportedly planning to introduce a mechanical timepiece around June this year, probably under its famous Edifice line. If this information is correct, Casio will join the other three major Japanese time houses – Citizen, Seiko and Orient – in having both quartz and automatic/mechanical watches.
It is still not known whether Casio has developed an in-house movement or will outsource the movement from another Japanese or Swiss company. It may even hand over the complete manufacture to an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer). Whatever happens, this will be a seismic shift in watch manufacturing if Casio actually goes ahead with it.
Many serious watch collectors are quartz snobs – they look only for automatic watches at somewhat high price ranges. But in doing so, they overlook some very fine quartz timepieces from both Japanese and Swiss maisons, not to mention leading micro brands such as Baltic and Farer. This is indeed a flawed policy. Quartz or automatic/mechanical, a watch should look good on your wrist and appeal to your senses. Besides, some quartz watches are cheap enough that if it gives up the ghost a few years down the road, it is no big loss. But it is definitely a loss if they do not find a place in your watch collection.
