- Jan 14, 2013
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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 2824 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.
Our watch collections were not that similar, I have nothing in the style of G-Shocks and digitals.