I don’t understand why most quartz watches are stuck with ticking second hands rather than smooth sweep second hands. I prefer quartz movements for their dramatically superior accuracy, but I also prefer the look of a smooth sweep second hand. I have yet to see a convincing explanation for why quartz second hands must tick beyond vague gesturing at power saving, but not only that, I have seen sweeping second hands on inexpensive quartz wall clocks from IKEA, so it’s clearly possible.
I regret to say I’ve started to think that ticking second hands on quartz watches are essentially cartelized marketing on the part of watchmakers to easily distinguish less expensive but technologically superior quartz movements from luxury-branded mechanical movements. Can anybody talk me out of this conspiratorial thinking, or confirm it?
Sure, you could do this in a cheaper quartz movement. You could step the hands as fast as you want in just about any quartz movement, as long as you microstepper and drive electronics are pretty good and efficient. So, that adds costs and, since you’re making it more expensive, you might as,well use a higher frequency and higher accuracy qyartz oscillator sincevthat adds a small marginal cost, but a big performance boost. So that gets down to features, marketing, and how you put together a product’s specs to justify the higher price point.
I believe the 262 KHz movements are only used by Bulova, as part of Citizen’s brand differentiation strategy.
There are much higher frequency quartz movements used in some Citizen’s high grade quartz, like the 8MHz Citizen 0100 movement. However, that opts to step the seconds hand at 1Hz. But, it’s claim to fame is +/- 1 second per year accuracy. Not cheap, though. In a white gold case it’ll set you back close to $20K. The movement is built much like a traditional high end mechanical watch, with machined and elaborately finished bridges, jeweled bearings, plus a very carefully crafted mechanical stabiliser that drops the second hand smoothly and cleanly on the mark, every second.
So, there’s all kinds of quartz, up to and including ones that look far nicer and cost much more than most mechanical watches and ones that sweep more smoothly than most mechanicals. If you want to get technical, Seiko’s Spring Drive movements, with the smoothest moving hands ever, are, in a sense quartz watches, since regulation is actively performed by a quartz oscillator, making it the source of the timekeeping precision. Sure, you could build a magnetically braked rotor that lets down a mainspring in a controlled way that might sorta work to keep time, a bit like the inertial balance wheel clocks of the 16th century, which drifted by tens of minutes per day, but it would have the same problem. It wasn’t until a fine spring was added to the concept of a balance wheel, making an oscillator that has a preferred frequency at which to operate, that balance wheel clocks even had the potential to match pendulum clocks. A wheel that spins isn’t an oscillator, nothing about its physics gives it a preferred rate. It can spin at any speed. So a magnetically braked wheel clock like the Spring Drive needs an oscillator to make it accurate, and in a Spring Drive, that oscillator is quartz. The quartz element is powered by electricity inductively generated by the magnetically braked wheel, the rate of which is governed by quartz element by changing the magnetic braking force, so there’s a lot of clever power conversion and feedback control going on, but ultimately it’s a quartz oscillator being used to control the movement of hands which display time: an analog quartz watch. And it has the smoothest hand of all time, since their motion is continuous.
There’s all kinds of quartz watches, cheap ones that step and are pretty accurate, expensive ones that step and are amazingly accurate, in between ones that are pretty smooth, and even spring powered ones that are infinitely smooth. All kinds.
High end watches aren’t really in my budget, but it is gratifying to hear that there are very high end quartz movements. But jewels and precious metals aren’t really my jam. What I want is a reasonably accurate watch that will run without me having to wear it or wind it, with a second hand that moves nice and smooth. (And since I’m also kind of particular about how they look, I want a nice wide variety to choose from, but that’s kind of my own thing.) The Seiko Spring Drive is a cool idea and the second hand movement is very nice, but I’d want a battery in there to obviate the winding.
Everyone has their own preferences. Personally, I hate having to use disposable batteries to keep something running, and I find winding a to be a nice, enjoyable thing to do while having my morning coffee. And, if it’s an automatic, a mechanical watch only needs winding when you first start it up, as long as you wear it every day.
Oh, and jewels as in “jeweled bearings” is more about durability and efficiency than expensive materials. Jeweled bearings, often referred to as just “jewels”, are made from synthetic ruby, but they’re incredibly cheap, pennies each. Instead of having metal on metal surfaces which wear on each other and create power wasting friction, you have a polished metal on polished ruby surface, with a tiny bit of lubricant that clings to the bearing due to its shape and surface tension, which provides a very low friction, very durable surfaces for support of rotating elements, like the posts the hands are mounted on, or arbors that support all the various gears in mechanical watches. Lots of better quality quartz watches use at least a handful of jewels for exactly the same reason. Lower drag on moving components and better durability is good whether the oscillator is quartz of mechanical. Since quartz watches have fewer, and lower mass, moving parts, thet can often get away with omitting jeweled bearings, but many quartz movements, even fairly low cost ones, will have a few jeweled bearings.
That’s fascinating about jeweled bearings! I had no idea, I definitely thought that watch descriptions of jewels was about incorporating additional luxury/expense.
As far as watch winding goes, I agree everybody gets to enjoy what they enjoy, and disposable batteries are kind of a drag. I’m not that interested in automatic or hand-wound movements because I like to be able to switch between a two or three watches, so I might go a week or two without wearing one, and I like it to still be running and on time when I put it on.