This question is asked all the time. The convincing answer is simple: a sweeping seconds hand uses a lot more power than a ticking one. Wall clocks can do it because they use comparatively massive batteries. Most people would rather have double the battery life than a smooth sweep.
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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I guess I just don’t find that answer very persuasive. I mean, I’m no engineer, but it seems like it wouldn’t be that hard to do. I mean, if it’s really only a factor of two, couldn’t you just fit a second battery in there?
But even setting that aside, mechanical movements translate the stepped movement of a governor through a series of interlocking gears to achieve a smooth motion, I don’t see why something similar can’t be added to a quartz movement.
Those things are technically possible, but they increase complexity and cost. The battery takes up a huge amount of space in most quartz movements - it’s by far the largest part - so it’s not trivial to just add a second one. Also, running batteries in a series causes difficulty…what happens if one battery dies prematurely? Most people wouldn’t be willing to pay double or more for their watch just to get a sweeping second hand.
Hybrid electronic movements that used battery power to drive a mechanical geartrain existed briefly in the early 1970s, but they were quickly replaced by quartz movements because they were inferior in every objective way.
Idk, it seems like some people are willing to pay quite a bit for watches, including ones that have features that add complexity without clear timekeeping benefit
you know honestly, i've pondered everything you've said many, many times as i also have an ikea quartz wall clock that sweeps perfectly. can they do it? i'm willing to bet that yes, it can be done. ffs, we can send things to mars.
the problem would seem that no one would want to spend the r&d to make this happen because the rewards likely will outweigh the risks. but in my opinion, im personally getting tired of reading about watch movements and how companies have spend so much time and money on developing their own in-house movement, blah blah blah and charging $10K and more for it.
at a certain point, it's all about looks for me. if i can get a watch that has a smooth quartz sweeping hand similar to the spring drive but for a fraction of the cost, i'm all for it. i don't care about the history behind the movement. i'm also willing to bet that a good many others would also buy it. i mean ffs look at the plastic omega speedmasters that are selling like crazy. i dunno, it's late for me here../rant over
But even setting that aside, mechanical movements translate the stepped movement of a governor through a series of interlocking gears to achieve a smooth motion, I don’t see why something similar can’t be added to a quartz movement.
Your understanding of mechanical watches is incorrect. They aren't somehow up-sampling the stepped movement of the 'governor' to make a more smooth movement. The balance of the watch ticks at a rate higher than 1Hz (4Hz is a very common beat rate.)
Oh that’s interesting. So most mechanical watches don’t have smooth motion, just smoother motion? What about music box movements, are those the same?
Music boxes don’t have escapements
It's mostly there to reduce power usage. Since a quartz movement keeps accurate time without motion, any motion is a direct draw from power storage. With mechanical watches, or even tuning for or spring drives, motion is integral to timekeeping, so you get hand motion "for free", so to speak.
But, some quartz movements emulate smoother motion. Probably the most common of these is the Bulova Precisionist line, based on Citizen's 262 KHz high frequency quartz technology. This includes chronograph movements which step their running seconds hand at 2Hz, which doesn't look too bad on a small subdial, and the chrono seconds much faster, plus a 1 second register that steps at 20Hz when operating, at least for the first 30 seconds. Then the 1 seconds register goes into saving mode, keeping track of the time, but not displaying the 1/20ths precision until the timing is halted. But, more along the lines of what you're describing are the time and date only versions of the 262KHz line, in which the seconds hand is continuously driven at 16 Hz, smoother than most mechanical watches.
As an added bonus, the high frequency quartz heart of it is more accurate over the long term than most quartz. There are more accurate quartz watches, but the Precisionist does an excellent job at its price point. Bulova/Citizen used to claim +/- 10 seconds per year, but there were enough issues with Precisionist movements which didn't quite achieve this accuracy that they dropped the claim. Just like mechanical watches, quartz accuracy can be affected by build quality and envionment, so many Precisionist movements will meet that standard, and then some, just not all of them. The specific example I have has lost 2.2 seconds in the last year, based on comparison to NIST time, so it's been quite good. So, if you want a watch that beats the pants off even the finest mechanical watches and has a smooth second hand, they're certainly available.
It's no conspiracy, it's just that most people don't care. Most people want cheap, durable, and maintenance free watches, and don't care about how smooth the seconds hand is, and ticking once per second extends battery life and reduces component wear, allowing really cheap quartz movements to operate for a long time on a single battery and have a good service life, even if made very cheaply.
But, it you put a little better engineering and manufacturing into a quartz movement, you can get smooth hands, good battery life and overall longevity, but it costs a little more.
This is an excellent response! Thanks!
But isn’t a 16 Hz second hand achievable with a normal 32,768 Hz quartz oscillator? Or does the Precisionist movements somehow save power somewhere?
Also, are the 262 kHz high frequency movements only available in the Bulova Precisionist line?
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.
inexpensive quartz wall clocks from IKEA, so it's clearly possible.
Not sure if you've noticed but those tend to be quite a bit larger than the average watch. So putting a normal sized battery in them isn't much of a challenge. Which means power isn't much of a concern. It's also vastly easier to change batteries in a wall clock, compared to a watch.
Fair enough. It’s very possible (even likely, I guess) that I just don’t understand the technical constraints. But it seems like it ought to be surmountable.
As I wrote in reply to another comment, most mechanical movements translate the stepwise movement of a governor through a series of interlocking gears to achieve a smooth motion, it seems like something like that could be applicable without draining too much additional power.
Yeah it's power like the other commenters posted. That's the reason why Spring Drive took over 2 decades of development and such an innovative technology from Grand Seiko - they actually made a functioning prototype very early on (in the 80s) but it took 20 more years to solve how to reduce power usage which incidentally created the iconic smooth sweep. SD is your only option if you want a truly smooth sweep.
I just watched a spring drive movement video on Seiko’s website, and it seems very cool, but requires hand winding! Seems like a cool idea, but I want my watches to just run.
There are automatic Spring Drives just like mechanicals, but you need to wear them to keep up the power reserve. But the idea/appeal is that they don't need batteries, which is why they're considered "hybrid" quartz+mechanical.
Yeah, I mean, I’m not trying to move the goalposts or anything, I just like the watch to run even if I’m not winding it wearing it.
There is always the Seiko VH31 quartz, which is quite smooth. You can't really tell that it's not an auto, especially in smaller sized cases. Hasn't really caught though. It's mostly found in Aliexpress watches.
Ok cool, that’s more like what I’m looking for! It would be even cooler if the second hand moved at 8 Hz instead of 4
How crazy is it to watch hack? Like, buy a movement I want and drop it into a watch case I like?
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.
The following is a copy paste of a document someone else compiled:
Quartz watches with second hands smoother than 1-tick-per-second
Quick note: A “sweep second hand” actually means a second hand that is in the center of the dial (rather than in a subdial). This was a complication in early watches, since it required an extra intermediate wheel. It’s called a “sweep” second hand because it sweeps the entire dial. These days, people often use “sweep second” to refer to a second hand that moves more smoothly than 1 tick per second, though I myself refer to these as “smooth second hands” or “smooth sweep second hands.”
These are all the ones I know about. If you know one I missed, DM me and I’ll add it. Note this excludes things like a Seiko Mechaquartz or Seiko 8M25 - only watches with more than 1 tick per second for main timekeeping.
==Truly smooth==
Seiko 5S21: first truly smooth wristwatch. Uses a damping system (a hairspring and a vial of fluid, similar to a remontoire mechanism) to convert a 4Hz stepper motor to a truly smooth sweep. Vintage only, made approx 1988 to 1995, available on ebay and yahoo JP for $200 or so, many styles
Seiko 5S42: high-accuracy quartz version of 5S21. Truly smooth sweep. Few styles. Ebay or Yahoo JP, $400 or $500.
Seiko Spring Drive: 1999. second commercial truly smooth sweep. Available in many different styles. Prices generally $3k+.
Piaget 700P: 2015, third commercial truly smooth sweep. Available in only one model, out of production, hard to find. $71k.
Accutron Spaceview 2020: 2020. Most recent truly smooth sweep. Uses an electrostatic motor for a smooth second hand. Note that the minute and hour hands are still stepper-motor activated. Limited. Around $4k. Large case size.
==Hundreds of ticks per second==
Beta 21: 1970. First commercial swiss quartz watch. Uses an indexing method similar to a tuning fork watch. 256 ticks per second. Sold by many Swiss makers; best known are the Omega cal 1300 (“Electroquartz” or “f8192”) and Rolex 5100. Somewhat fidgety to service and keep working. $1500 or so for Omega models, which are usually the cheapest.
Longines Ultraquartz: 1970. Uses an indexing method similar to a tuning fork. 170 ticks per second. Quite fidgety to service and keep working. $1200 or so for working TV-case models; $1500 or so for cushion case.
Bulova Accuquartz: 1972. Essentially a Bulova Accutron 218 movement, retrofitted to drive the tuning fork frequency with a quartz timing package. 341.3 ticks per second. Somewhat fidgety to service and keep working. Many styles. $250 or so.
==More than 1 tick per second: balance wheel driven==
Citizen 8810: 1973. First Citizen quartz watch. Used a balance wheel driven by an electromagnet, whose timing is governed by a quartz timing package. 16 ticks per second (fastest-moving balance wheel used for main timekeeping for a watch in history). Uncommon, maybe 1 or 2 per year on Yahoo JP auctions. $300 to $1000, hard to say given rarity.
Luch 3055: 1981. First Analog Soviet quartz watch. Used a balance wheel driven by an electromagnet, whose timing is governed by a quartz timing package. 8 ticks per second. Available on Ebay for about $100. Many styles.
Record-Golay mu Quartz: 1972. Used a balance wheel driven by an electromagnet, whose timing is governed by a quartz timing package. 8 ticks per second. Very rare, definitely less than 1 per year.
Timex model 62 and 63: 1972. Uncommon 49,152Hz quartz crystal. Used a balance wheel driven by an electromagnet, whose timing is governed by a quartz timing package. 6 ticks per second. I don’t follow this market but probably not too rare or expensive.
Porta 5002: Good luck. Very little information available. I have seen maybe 2 or 3 documented online.
==More than 1 tick per second: stepper motor==
Bulova Precisionist/UHF/Accutron II: 2010. Available in many styles. Has a 262KHz quartz crystal. Ticks 16 times per second. Also available in chronographs, where only the chrono second hand ticks 16 times per second. Also available in Ladies sizes; only smoother-than-1-Hz watch explicitly in Ladies. $300, huge variance depending on model.
Casio Module 5566: Available in the Casio MTD-1086, MTP-SW300, MTP-SW310, MTP-SW320, MTP-SW330. Module is stamped VH36A, related to the Seiko VH31 below. 4Hz second hand tick. Also available is the Casio MTP-SW340, probably with the Seiko VH61. (Thanks u/takealookatwrist)
Seiko VH31: 2018. 4-tick-per-second three-hander. Used in many microbrand pieces (Newmark 52, Kingsbury Monarch, etc.). $200 ish, depends on which watch. Other related Seiko high-beat movements in the VH family may be floating around as well, there are ten different VH movements with 4Hz second hands.
Junghans Meister Mega: 2018. Radio controlled. Promised 7spy with radio off but my testing indicates this is laughably missed. Uncommon 32,670Hz quartz. Stepper motor runs at 2Hz. Recommend people avoid. $1000, give or take.
This is a great list, thanks!