Is anyone else's automatic more accurate than their quartz?

[CitizenM]

I'm just not sure how rare it is. One of my friends has 5-6 different Omega automatics and they never seem that accurate (not bad, just not superior, between +1 a day to +8). I test my Orient against time.gov every day, and I've done it most days (maybe 4 days a week) for the last 6 months. Today marks 6 months even from when I received my Planet Orient.

To date, it has gained 12 seconds. There can be some weekly variance, but it all evens itself out. It has never died or been set other than when it was removed from the box.

How normal is this?

[tfar]

That's an excellent result for an automatic watch. A total of 12 seconds over six months is superb for any watch even a quartz, let alone a $365 japanese automatic. Makes me a bit jealous. :) If you really watch it and play with the crown position when you lay it down you can achieve such results. But if you don't do that, it's truly special. You got really lucky.
The +1-8 seconds a day is not so bad in itself. Just one thing you should keep in mind the "evening out" is maybe not quite the best way to measure the rate. The daily deviation is more important I find.

Another matter is how much you wear it. It seems you wear it everyday very regularly. This is optimal. Many here have so many watches in their rotation that wearing one for half a year is out of the question. So they get wound down or put on a winder which obviously has an influence on the rate.

I have three watches that are up to or over Chronometer standards. A Panerai, a Rolex and a JLC. I have never tested their accuracy over such a long period and I have never paid any attention how I laid them down which was usually face up which makes them go faster. They gain 1-3 seconds a day.



Till

[CitizenM]

I do play with the position to achieve it at times. If I don't wear it much and the spring starts to run down, it seems to run faster (I suppose I may be conflating it with it simply resting face up in the case).
If I wear it for a week straight, I can't see +/- anything, maybe half a second, but it's hard to say. But some days I wear my Citizen 8651 instead and that's when it'll pick up a second a day or so. I leave it crown up maybe one night a week and it seems to even out. If I were to wear it exclusively, I think it would have gained much less than the 12 seconds today.

In a way, it bothers me. It's a fantastic watch, but I do plan on moving on to different ones eventually. I've got my eye on an Ananta Double Retrograde, but if it were to be noticeably less accurate for 10 times the price, I would be irritated.

[tfar]

Time setting over the internet can also introduce quite a lag. It is better in principle to use a radio-controlled atomic watch. Less chances of lag. But even the radio atomics can be about one second apart. With time over internet you have stuff like connection speed, server loads, CPU load etc to deal with. Get a cheap radio-controlled watch as a reference. I have several G-Shocks and one Seiko to do that. But the cheapest one I've got is a weather station from Oregon Scientific I bought at Target. It's model BAR208HGA (crazy name). It is on the spot with my other watches and syncs very reliably every night. I got it because I use its remote thermo/hygrometer to control the conditions in my humidor without opening it. But the correct time is a nice side effect. I don't really use the weather part of it. But it even has moonphase which could be handy for people with moonphase watches.

Here is a link:
http://www.amazon.com/Oregon-Scienit.../dp/B002JM0DEK

Till

[CitizenM]

I'd love to have one of those devices. Maybe I'll pick it up over the summer. As per the accuracy of time.gov, it appears to be correct as confirmed by my quartz watches--i.e., the relationship of, say, the +3 seconds my Citizen is today is confirmed every day (taking into account that the Citizen gains a consistent second a week or so.)

[tfar]

That's cool then. The deviation is the most important thing, as well as having a constant reference. The absolute time is secondary. But the little weather station is one of the cheapest ways to get a radio-controlled reference. I'm sure there are cheaper ones out there, though.

Till

[CitizenM]

Yeah, it looks fantastic. $50 isn't bad at all. The Omega guy has something like that he uses. He reports that it can differ from time.gov inexplicably from day to day, although obviously, we have no reason to believe it isn't time.gov's fault or both.

But I have no clocks in my room at all, except for my small alarm clock. I think it'd just be nice to have around.

[HilltopMichael]

While I'm not going to state that most automatics are more accurate than a quartz watch, one of the things that I do like about mechanical movements is that over the long term they can be quite accurate - especially if you help it a bit by setting it down appropriately at night. A quartz watch that gains 0.5 seconds a day is going to do that every day and will drift further and further from the true time.

The best that I've seen from an automatic watch (my Glycine Lagunare 1000) is +0 seconds after 45 days. I wore that watch for about 2 1/2 months daily, and if I pick the correct two dates there's no change in the error from true time. For the entire 2 1/2 months it ran 0.4 seconds fast/day. Most of my manual wind watches with the 6497/8 movements can be within a few seconds of true time if I'm careful how I set them down at night.

I'll try to regulate a watch as close as I can - wear the watch as I normally would to see how it runs and then adjust the rate as needed. Since I normally try to change watches every few days they're never very far off from true time. Works for me...

[tfar]

Michael, what's your experience with watch orientation? Is it coherent with the Rolex advice?
See here: http://www.minus4plus6.com/regulation.htm

If so, how many seconds do your watches gain or lose over night and how long do you wear them during the day? My watches get eight hours of wear a day if they are lucky because I like to change them during the day and I don't wear one at home usually. I haven't tinkered with crown positioning yet.

Till

[mr00jimbo]

My automatic runs +1 a day and I found that quite amazing, but it continues to get better. I hope it starts running +0 a day soon...then again the slight inaccuracy of an automatic adds to its allure in some way.