To be fair, a crystal clock is just going to be more accurate than a movement based watch. Even the biggest watch fanboys admit that a $30 Seiko Casio outperforms the majority of mechanicals on raw accuracy.
So... The existing market leader chose to flip the table instead of admitting that their position was weaker and lower value.
Yep, that sure sounds like the pursuit of capital instead of... innovation, quality, or any of the other attributes capitalism attempts to associate itself with.
The Neuchâtel Observatory is a publicly funded institution that certifies movements with high accuracy as chronometers. Not a private body, or a marketing tool used by a watchmaker. The same ‘competition’ is done by other observatories, all giving their own rating of a timepiece’s accuracy against a reference chronometer kept at the observatory.
A quick search could have brought you that information_ Quartz movements beat the pants off mechanical movements, and they’re far cheaper to make, allowing the non-rich to have a decent watch with good battery life and serious accuracy. Cheap and normal mechanical watches regularly drift and lose a few seconds time over days and weeks - quartz drifts between 1-110 seconds over a year.
They aren't talking about quartz watches though. Seiko makes mechanical watches that were being compared to swiss mechanical watches costing way more.
So funnily enough, the very first movement they submitted to the contest in 1963 was a quartz, and it placed tenth overall. They went with mechanical movements for subsequent competitions, and didn’t actually start placing high again until 1966 when they placed ninth overall. In ‘67 they did even better, placing fourth, but then the contest was canceled for good the next year.
To be fair, a crystal clock is just going to be more accurate than a movement based watch. Even the biggest watch fanboys admit that a $30
SeikoCasio outperforms the majority of mechanicals on raw accuracy.So... The existing market leader chose to flip the table instead of admitting that their position was weaker and lower value.
Yep, that sure sounds like the pursuit of capital instead of... innovation, quality, or any of the other attributes capitalism attempts to associate itself with.
The Neuchâtel Observatory is a publicly funded institution that certifies movements with high accuracy as chronometers. Not a private body, or a marketing tool used by a watchmaker. The same ‘competition’ is done by other observatories, all giving their own rating of a timepiece’s accuracy against a reference chronometer kept at the observatory.
A quick search could have brought you that information_ Quartz movements beat the pants off mechanical movements, and they’re far cheaper to make, allowing the non-rich to have a decent watch with good battery life and serious accuracy. Cheap and normal mechanical watches regularly drift and lose a few seconds time over days and weeks - quartz drifts between 1-110 seconds over a year.
They aren't talking about quartz watches though. Seiko makes mechanical watches that were being compared to swiss mechanical watches costing way more.
So funnily enough, the very first movement they submitted to the contest in 1963 was a quartz, and it placed tenth overall. They went with mechanical movements for subsequent competitions, and didn’t actually start placing high again until 1966 when they placed ninth overall. In ‘67 they did even better, placing fourth, but then the contest was canceled for good the next year.