What are common misconceptions regarding quartz watches?

There are several, and the most persistent one is also the most ironic.

Misconception #1: Quartz is inherently cheap technology.

This is almost perfectly backwards — historically speaking.

When Seiko launched the Astron on December 25, 1969, it was priced at 450,000 yen. That was equivalent to the cost of a mid-size family car at the time. The movement inside was a marvel of miniaturized electronics, temperature compensation, and precision frequency regulation that no mechanical watch could match. The engineers who built those early quartz calibers were working at the absolute frontier of applied physics.

The Concord Delirium is another case I always come back to when someone tells me quartz is cheap technology. When it launched in July 1979, it was priced at approximately CHF 20,000 — adjusted for Swiss inflation, that’s somewhere north of CHF 50,000 in today’s money. The case was hand-finished by Favre & Perret, the same atelier responsible for the Patek Philippe Nautilus ref. 3700. What justified that price was a movement so radical that the components were mounted directly onto the caseback, which served as the mainplate — an integration that required the development of the world’s smallest battery, a Renata cell measuring just 1.1 mm thick. None of that sounds like a cheap watch. It sounds like an engineering programme funded at the level of a space mission — which, in a sense, it was.

The idea that quartz equals cheap came later — as a consequence of the technology’s own success. Once production scaled, once integrated circuits commoditized, once Timex and Casio figured out how to put quartz oscillators into $10 watches, the origin story got buried under the avalanche. But the technology itself didn’t change. What changed was the cost of manufacturing it at volume. Quartz was like the development of the PC. The first computers were insanely expensive. Same as quartz watches.

Misconception #2: A luxury quartz watch is a mechanical watch that failed to be mechanical.

No. A Grand Seiko 9F, an IWC Schaffhausen quartz from the 1970s, a vintage Omega Marine Chronometer — these are not consolation prizes. They were deliberate engineering choices made by brands that understood what quartz could do that mechanical simply cannot: accuracy measured in seconds per year, not seconds per day.

The vintage market is now catching up to this reality. Early high-end quartz pieces — Longines Ultra-Quartz, Omega Megaquartz, Zenith Defy Quartz, Rolex Beta 21-equipped references — are climbing steadily in collector interest and auction prices. These are not cheap watches that got old. They are historically significant instruments that got forgotten during the mechanical revival, and collectors are rediscovering them today.

Misconception #3: You can’t be passionate about quartz.

This one I find genuinely strange. The devotion to mechanical horology is entirely legitimate — I share it — but it sometimes shades into a reflex snobbery that doesn’t survive contact with the actual history. The people who built the first quartz watches were passionate enough to spend a decade solving problems that had never been solved before. The collectors who now hunt vintage quartz references are equally serious about what they’re doing.

What enthusiasts should actually know:

If you own or are considering a vintage high-end quartz watch, the key practical issues are battery replacement logistics (some vintage cells are no longer standard), capacitor degradation in certain solar and kinetic designs, and the fact that some movements from the 1970s CEH Beta consortium were produced in very small numbers, making spare parts genuinely scarce.

And if you’re dismissing vintage luxury quartz on principle, you’re probably leaving some of the most interesting pieces in twentieth-century watchmaking on the table — at prices that still reflect the misconception, not the reality.