An automatic diving watch or a quartz diving watch?
This is one of the key issues in the world of watches. What is the difference? and which one is better? These questions will be answered in this article, so read on and find out the answers to your queries.
Quartz watches brought the mechanical watch industry near submission in the late 1970s and 1980s. Since Hamilton created the first electric watch, the Ventura, in the late 1950s, the battery revolution o Quartz changed the way people viewed time. Before quartz watches it was part of the daily routine to reset your watch by the TV or radio, the precision of the quartz movement and the longevity of the charge made this little routine a thing of the past. Quartz movements have become so ingrained in people’s daily lives that automatic watches have almost become a distant memory. Brands like Omega, Tissot, and Oris tried to fight head-on with Japanese and American quartz watch makers like Casio and Timex, but in the late 1990s and 2000s, Swiss watch companies fought the quartz revolution. Swiss watch companies are creating luxury watches, quality watches that are desirable and aspirational to all who see them.
But as a diver’s watch, what’s the difference between a cheap quartz diver’s watch and a Swiss automatic diver’s watch? For example, what is the difference between a Timex Expedition Diver and an Oris Pro Diver, apart from the obvious £2200 price difference? Both offer the same basic surface diving functionality to the wearer, but is there something else that makes automatic watches that much more expensive? Here are some key differences between automatic watch and quartz watch.
- Timex Expedition Diver timekeeping will be more accurate than Oris Pro Diver timekeeping for a period of 1 month. The reason for this is that the Timex watch uses battery power to charge a capacitor which then powers the watch movement, whereas an automatic watch uses the movement to charge a spring which releases power to the watch movement. A high quality automatic watch movement has a margin of error of + or – 1 second per day compared to the variation of a quartz watch which is less than 1 second per year. Should this be the same?
- Oris watch uses Swiss mechanical engineering to produce each movement by hand and each movement is quality tested before it can be shipped to retailers and sold to the general public. The Timex is machine produced in a factory in China and one watch out of 100 is tested.
- All Swiss manufacturers such as Oris use a unique serial number that makes it possible to identify the watch and to trace each watch back to the point of sale and manufacturing. Companies like Timex and Casio do not provide unique serial numbers due to the massive quantities of each item being created daily.
- The automatic watch only requires maintenance every 3 to 5 years. The quartz watch will need a new battery every 2 to 5 years depending on the use of its functions.
- The automatic watch will stop and will need to be manually reset if it is left off the wrist for more than 40 hours. The quartz watch will continue to run until the battery fails or there is a mechanical failure.
- There are minimal devices in the mechanical watch. There will be no on-board dive computer or dive logging facility, these functions can be found in quartz watches. Companies like Casio, Citizen, and Tissot make watches that have the ability to record data from your dives for use at a later date.
The key to think about is whether this dive watch will be a functional addition to the dive equipment you already own, to provide you with dive data without having to purchase a dive computer. If so, a digital watch will provide much of the information on its digital display, the key men’s watches for this are the Sea Touch and the Citizen Pro master.
Or for this watch to be something more than diving, does this diving watch have to be timeless and have the possibility of being used outside of diving? If the answer to this question is yes, an automatic diver’s watch is a perfect addition to a watch collection and is a great status symbol as well as a useful piece of diving equipment.
