8/10/2023 0 Comments Rolex timepiece![]() ![]() Some Rolex owners measure the accuracy of their own watches and find that their watch might lose or gain 5 second per day. Many quartz watches vary by tenths…even hundredths of a second per day. Falling back to our earlier Bicycle technology, if Rolex made bicycles, they’d be some of the fastest produced in the industry – but still no comparison to a jet airplane. Thus, within the constraints of mechanical watch making technology, Rolex is an industry leader in manufacturing accurate movements. While many mechanical watch manufacturers submit some of their watch movements to the COSC institute for Chronometer Certification, Rolex is one of the only manufacturers that submits virtually every mechanical watch movement they make to COSC. Simply put, in order to achieve Chronometer Certification from COSC, a mechanical watch movement must vary no more than -4 to +6 seconds per day variance from a constant source in a 24 hour period. In the mechanical watch industry, the highest standard of excellence is the COSC Chronometer Certification standard. You can spend a lot of money on a bicycle, but it will still never be as fast as a jet airplane. In truth, there are mechanical watches which cost 10 or more times the cost of a Rolex, and the accuracy of those watches don’t compare any more favourably to quartz watch technology. “But what about all this money I paid for a Rolex?” Like many luxury items, there simply isn’t a one to one correlation between dollars spent and performance. ![]() Yet, every day, people ask “why doesn’t my Rolex run as accurately as a quartz watch?” Such a comparison really is the text book definition of comparing apples to oranges. ![]() No one would compare the efficiency of a bicycle as a mode of transportation to that of a jet airplane – that would be silly. The same can be said of a mechanical watch vs. Still, the bicycle has its place – the fact that you can’t go as fast on a bicycle as you can a jet airplane does not diminish the appeal and ultimately the value of a bicycle. Just like a jet airplane will travel from point A to point B faster than a bicycle. Now, while it’s simply outside of the scope of this article to compare and contrast the relative merits of both quartz and mechanical watch technologies, one cannot deny that a quartz watch will definitely run more accurately than a mechanical one. Quartz technology (invented by Seiko in the late 1960’s) has only been around a few decades. Why? Mechanical watch making is relatively speaking, ancient technology that has changed very little in hundreds of years. However, if having the most precise, accurate time keeping device possible is your goal, a Rolex watch (or any mechanical watch for that matter) simply isn’t going to satisfy as compared to a relatively inexpensive quartz watch. Prior to the relatively recent inventions of both atomic clocks and quartz watches, a mechanical watch was consider one of the most precise and accurate methods of keeping time. Simply put, timekeeping accuracy is a measure (usually expressed in seconds per day) of how much a watch’s timekeeping varies from a relatively constant source (such as an atomic clock) over a 24 hour period. ![]()
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