Wristwatch enthusiasts can be persnickety. They often have strong opinions about whether bezels should be bidirectional. They can cite the differences between ETA and Sellita movements. They will happily preach the gospel of microadjust clasps and guilloche dials.
And for years — decades, really — they formed a fairly unified front when it came to their contempt for quartz watches. Unlike mechanical timepieces, which are like Rube Goldberg machines in miniature, quartz watches are essentially powered by an electronic circuit. To purists, this felt like cheating.
“There was this idea that quartz was somehow diametrically opposed to the nobility of mechanical Swiss watchmaking,” said Andrew McUtchen, the founder of Time & Tide Watches, an online publication based in Australia. “But time has healed some of those wounds — pardon the pun.”
No longer carrying as much of a stigma, quartz has found an audience among collectors who, until recently, never could have fathomed slapping anything other than mechanical watches onto their wrists. But thanks to a growing emphasis on design and technological advancement, many brands — big and small — are pushing quartz forward.
Grand Seiko, for example, has an exceptional quartz movement known as the Caliber 9F. Citizen has the light-powered Caliber 0100, which the company says is accurate to within one second a year. And TAG Heuer has the Aquaracer Solargraph, a popular model that was first released in 2022. The brand recently released a limited-edition iteration in collaboration with Time & Tide. Priced at more than $3,000 each, all 250 pieces sold out within 24 hours.
