French innovator aims to consign ticking quartz watches to history
A French company (SilMach) backed by Timex Group is claiming to have opened a new chapter in watchmaking with the creation of a silicon motor that matches the accuracy of quartz-based movements with the elegance of a mechanical watch’s sweeping hands.
I'll believe that it's a contender against existing quartz movements when they lay out the production costs for their design. You can't consign discrete ticks to the dustbin of history until you can compete with a $3 SpongeBob watch from Malaysia.
So this is pretty much just an advertisement. A total of 69 (giggidy) people so far have pre ordered this watch on Kickstarter.
It's an overpriced watch with cheap materials and a novel motor. Hell, they even want 300 pounds for an extra leather strap.
All the intricate gears and gems and precise parts/machinery that makes high end watched actually have a bit of merit to their cost....none of it is in this watch. The thing though be 150. Not 1800.
I wonder how long the battery lasts. However, some big watches with conventional mechanisms use standard small movements with lots of free space (I could extend the battery life by sticking 4 more SR626SW cells there) so a larger battery could be an option.
It says the battery lasts 10 years before you have to replace it.
But I preferred my watches (I've gone smartwatch, now) to have the self winding as you walk mechanism inside. If you had more than one they made moving display cases that would keep them wound if you didn't want to bother with setting the time again after a few days of not wearing it, plus those always seemed way cooler than needing a battery.
There's no way I'd buy one right now. I do own a couple of the more affordable Timex watches and about half a dozen, really inexpensive, novelty Chinese watches.
It could bring to an end the trick of spotting a battery powered watch by the jumping motion of its seconds hand because the SilMach motor powers sweeping hands.
This is bullshit. Some of my parents' wallclock from the early 2000s already got sweeping hands. That "trick" was brought to an end literally decades ago.
catching up to Seiko with a copy of their springdrive is neither unique nor an innovation.... it's a copy.
Admittedly I'm not that into watches, but my mechanical watches also tick in discrete steps. Those are just smaller steps than once a second.
If that's what some people apparently care about, why not make a quartz watch move the hands in increments of (say) 1/16ths of a second? It seems totally feasible without fancy new motors.
Higher beat quartz watches do exist, like Bulova's Precisionist watches (which I believe do beat 16 times per second like you mention).
My understanding is that they are not more common because moving the hands more frequently like this uses battery a lot faster, so the watches either need to be bigger for more battery or require more frequent battery changes.
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The second hand on my Citizen does advance in second jumps, but it can also sweep smoothly forward or backward when making adjustments. The jump is an intentional feature and not a limitation of the mechanism. I'm guessing the advance here is in making capabilities like that more affordable, but I'm not entirely sure.
I think it's proof of concept right now.
I'm a tech guy and don't give a crap about the sweeping motion of a watch hand. I'd rather have a watch that tells me the time, date, my messages, and vitals while also being able to configure how it looks plus change that any time I like. Way more useful than, "Wow, look at that hand sweep by!"
I guess I just don't "get it" when it comes to watches like this. Is there something I'm missing?
The sweeping motion of a mechanical watch is somewhat incidental. Yes, higher-end watch movements will beat at a higher rate than cheap ones, thus making their motion more smooth and their timekeeping more accurate. However, after a certain price point (let's say, >1k USD) that ceases to be a factor and choices like material, brand, complications (aka "features"), and finish make up most of the expense. Beyond that (>100k USD), you get to the price point of watches as high end art.
Anyway, for me as a tech guy, it's about style and simplicity. I want a beautiful, legible dial in a form factor that doesn't make my wrist look like a toothpick. I have a compulsion to always know the time, while also wanting to disconnect from my phone for certain things. A smart watch is too phone-like for me.
Often those "higher rate" movements are wasted anyway on a timekeeping device that doesn't have any way to set the time precisely.
Quartz, on a network connected watch, is able to be reliably within tens of milliseconds of the official time which is a level of accuracy you're never going to get on a watch where you manually set the time. It's physically impossible to control your fingers with timing as short as that. There's no way you can press the button within 100 milliseconds of a reference timepiece time unless you spend an hour trying again and again then check how far off you were.
This is a solved problem. I'm all for finding new and interesting ways to solve it... but I don't like the claim that this is a "new chapter" in watchmaking.
it's fun, just look at it go
I feel like jumping hands are more fun though
you're not a tech guy, you're a tech enthusiast.
someone who understands computers will reduce the "smart" devices in their home to the minimum.
As a programmer, I'm pretty sure I understand computers. It all comes down to who you trust because at the end of the day we all have smart phones with us just about 24/7 with the potential to access just about every aspect of our lives in real-time. Personally, I don't really trust any company so I limit what I put into my smart phone.
It's basically just style. I don't get why people worry about wearing specific brands of shoes, or why some folks still insist on wearing ties. Conversely, some strange people don't understand why I like to wear a cloak while out walking on a blustery fall day.
Some people just really like watches with hands.
I think it's interesting just because it's an innovation. Personally I'm not very interested in smart watches. Everyone's different though