I personally do not see the attraction of automatic watches. I can comprehend the arguments that they are finely crafted and intricate tools, but I am just not interested. I want a watch for some reasons: to tell time accurately, to be attractive, ease of use, and to be built well/tough. I can see if all you had were one or two watches, automatics work, but they don't work to me if you want a collection of watches.
I have about 12 watches, of which half were $2-300 and the rest were $500-900 (these are gray market online prices not retail). I made a few poor decisions but they were relatively cheap ones. I now have 6 watches I really love or like a lot, a couple I like quite a bit, and a few I don't like much at all, which I'll be offloading. Automatic doesn't work for me. I sometimes wear one watch straight for a month or two, and then sometimes wear 3 watches in a week. I like being able to pick up any watch in my collection and it just works aka it has the time ticking and accurately depicting the time and date. Automatic watches would all be dead from not being wound. Most of my watches are solar powered, and they have power reserves from the months to a year plus. So they are ticking. On top of that they have perpetual calendars for the most part, so the date is always right. And they are quartz, so they are more accurate than automatics. On top of that several of my watches are synced either by radio waves or satellite to the Atomic time. So they are really super accurate - to the second of the most accurate time on Earth. So for my purposes the automatics are an inferior product in some senses, the sense of telling time - they run out of juice easy and they run out of accuracy faster than their quartz brothers..
Now you can get a watch winding case but they are also money, and also big and bulky. Fine if you have 2 watches, but not so fine if you have 6 or more and limited space. I will eventually buy 1-2 automatics but that's it for me, unless I become ATOT rich and move out into the burbs where I can afford dresser and closet space the size of an elephant.
Not to mention I do use the alarm and timer function of some of my watches that are digital powered.
I also don't get the appeal of Rolex watches unless you feel the need to tell the world you have the money to drop X amount of dollars on a watch. I have only one 'luxury' brand name and that is a Movado. The rest are Citizens, Seikos, Avi's and a Certina. Some Rolexes are good looking, but many are fugly or just average looking, and while they have great automatic time mechanisms, they are still limited by the restraints of automatic movements. And don't tell me an $8k Rolex movement is really that much better than a high end $1K Japaneses automatic movement. I'm not buying it, that statement just ain't telling the time that accurately - well at least as accurate as a quartz timepiece.
I put in an offer on a Zenith El Primero, then retracted it, its tough to avoid going back into luxury watches for me.
I got my gold Submariner clone so I'm good now. Saved me $20 grand I would've wasted.
Very nice! Didn't Rolex use Zenith movements for the Daytona for a long time?
Up until 2000 I have read. This one is even sexier, to me at least.
I got my gold Submariner clone so I'm good now. Saved me $20 grand I would've wasted.
I'm curious, did you buy that watch because you wanted people to think you are wearing a $34,000 watch?
Lots of pics of the real thing in this thread.
https://www.rolexforums.com/showthread.php?t=568273
It is a very pretty watch.
Oooh, I like that! I'd love to add a chronograph to my collection at some point. I'm on the waiting list for one of the new ceramic Daytona's in SS at my local authorized dealer but it will be a couple years before they get to my name.
For some reason I keep gravitating to the 41mm Day-Date in all gold. I tried one on recently and thought it looked great on me. Some think it is too flashy but I liked it. Maybe when I retire I'll get it as a retirement gift. I think that is my "Grail Watch"
Both. I like the design of the watch and it looks exactly like the gold Rolex Submariner I was thinking about buying. Then I found this Invicta clone for $90 on Amazon. So I said to myself why do I want to waste $20k on used gold Submariner when I can get the same satisfaction from $90 watch? I'm not watch or Rolex person. I only care about the 18k gold on the Rolex and I have crap load of real 24k gold. So the choice was easy. And my desire for gold Rolex Submariner is now completely gone so the watch served its $90 purpose.
But Jules, you'll be happy to know Invicta feels like cheap $90 watch. My Seiko Black Monster feels like million bucks next to cheap Invicta.
I personally do not see the attraction of automatic watches. I can comprehend the arguments that they are finely crafted and intricate tools, but I am just not interested. I want a watch for some reasons: to tell time accurately, to be attractive, ease of use, and to be built well/tough. I can see if all you had were one or two watches, automatics work, but they don't work to me if you want a collection of watches.
I have about 12 watches, of which half were $2-300 and the rest were $500-900 (these are gray market online prices not retail). I made a few poor decisions but they were relatively cheap ones. I now have 6 watches I really love or like a lot, a couple I like quite a bit, and a few I don't like much at all, which I'll be offloading. Automatic doesn't work for me. I sometimes wear one watch straight for a month or two, and then sometimes wear 3 watches in a week. I like being able to pick up any watch in my collection and it just works aka it has the time ticking and accurately depicting the time and date. Automatic watches would all be dead from not being wound. Most of my watches are solar powered, and they have power reserves from the months to a year plus. So they are ticking. On top of that they have perpetual calendars for the most part, so the date is always right. And they are quartz, so they are more accurate than automatics. On top of that several of my watches are synced either by radio waves or satellite to the Atomic time. So they are really super accurate - to the second of the most accurate time on Earth. So for my purposes the automatics are an inferior product in some senses, the sense of telling time - they run out of juice easy and they run out of accuracy faster than their quartz brothers..
Now you can get a watch winding case but they are also money, and also big and bulky. Fine if you have 2 watches, but not so fine if you have 6 or more and limited space. I will eventually buy 1-2 automatics but that's it for me, unless I become ATOT rich and move out into the burbs where I can afford dresser and closet space the size of an elephant.
Not to mention I do use the alarm and timer function of some of my watches that are digital powered.
I also don't get the appeal of Rolex watches unless you feel the need to tell the world you have the money to drop X amount of dollars on a watch. I have only one 'luxury' brand name and that is a Movado. The rest are Citizens, Seikos, Avi's and a Certina. Some Rolexes are good looking, but many are fugly or just average looking, and while they have great automatic time mechanisms, they are still limited by the restraints of automatic movements. And don't tell me an $8k Rolex movement is really that much better than a high end $1K Japaneses automatic movement. I'm not buying it, that statement just ain't telling the time that accurately - well at least as accurate as a quartz timepiece.
Watch collecting is a funny thing. When I started out I had a collection that sounds very similar to yours. Lot's of g-shocks, other casio digitals, eco drives, quartz seikos etc. but over time I began to appreciate watches for more than just the time keeping aspect.
Mechanical watches are not overly accurate unless you start spending quite a lot of money a stock standard ETA movement will get you a positional variance of +/- 30 seconds. In other words if the watch is running 30 seconds fast or slow per day that is within manufacturing tolerances.
My grand seiko runs a spring drive which is a quartz mechanical hybrid. It's still classed as an automatic but that has a positional variance of +/- 1 second per day. ETA and seiko also make high accuracy quartz movements. The seiko 9F series of movements has a variance of +/- 10 seconds per year.
Citizen and seiko are serious watch making companies. Cheaper mass produced watches are their bread and butter but seiko has the grand seiko and credor lines which sell watches that cost up to 500k including minute repeaters and tourbillons. Citizen recently made a 90k tourbillon.
You might find that you begin to appreciate the actual aspects of how the watch was made as well or you might not.
One of the interesting things that seiko does with their higher end stuff is exercise the Japanese penchant for incorporating nature and art into the watch design.
It's hard to photograph it but the texture on the dial of my GS snowflake actually looks like snow drifts and is based on the snowdrifts around the town of Shiojiri where the Shinshu Watch Studio is located. Which is where the watch was made and part of the main plate of the movement has been shaped to resemble the outline of mount fuji.
Was considering getting an 856 for a while.
okay now I skimmed the thread and want that T1B haha