Why are automatic watches more expensive than a quartz if they e less accurate?
Automatic watches are much rarer nowadays than quartz watches, which could make them more expensive. I could have my pick from 20 or 30 quartz watches in Walmart, for instance, while I would probably have to go to a high-end jewelry store to find one real self-winding watch anymore. I think that the self-winders have a big advantage over the quartz watches in that you never have to worry about the battery dying unexpectedly. I had a quartz watch die out one morning unexpectedly right before I had to give a big presentation. (And it was very unexpected, no slowing down or losing accuracy, no second-hand-moving-two-seconds-at-a-time warning that the battery was low – it was perfectly on time to get me to the bus in the morning, and by 10:40am, it had completely stopped.) So there I was, sitting thinking that I still had 20 minutes to prepare myself for my 11:00am presentation, when in fact I was actually 5 minutes late and everyone was sitting there waiting impatiently for me. I routinel
Are quartz watches always more accurate than mechanical ones? Typically they are, but not always. Accuracy and precision are not exactly the same thing. It is important to remember that even when a mechanical watch is allowed to vary +6/-4 seconds per day, that does not mean it will consistently vary by that high an amount each day. Mechanical movements–except the very rare ‘turbillon’ movements that correct for it–are noticably affected by the gravitational pull of the Earth. It only takes a performance distortion of 1/1000th of a percent for a watch movement to be one second less accurate in a day. This causes the performance of mechanical movements to be somewhat different from day to day when not stored in a fixed position. The good news is that the actual variations of a mechanical watch will often cancel each other out. This means a mechanical watch will tend to be more accurate over a longer period than the single-day COSC measurement may imply. The day-to-day performance of q
