This is one of the key issues in the world of watches. What is the difference? and which one is better? These questions will be answered in this article, so read on and find out the answers to your queries.

Quartz watches brought the mechanical watch industry to near submission in the late 1970s and 1980s. Ever since Hamilton created the first electric watch, the Ventura, in the late 1950s, the battery revolution or quartz changed the way people saw time. Before quartz watches, it was part of the daily routine to reset your watch by the TV or radio, the precision of the quartz movement and the longevity of the charge made this little routine a thing of the past. Quartz movements have become so ingrained in people’s daily lives that automatic watches almost became a distant memory. Brands like Omega, Tissot, and Oris tried to go head-to-head with Japanese and American quartz watchmakers like Casio and Timex, but in the late 1990s and 2000s, Swiss watch companies fought back against the quartz revolution. Swiss watch companies are creating luxury watches, quality watches that are desirable and aspirational for all who see them.

But as a dive watch, what is the difference between a cheap quartz dive watch and a Swiss automatic dive watch? For example, what is the difference between a Timex Expedition Diver and an Oris Pro Diver, aside from the obvious £2,200 price difference? Both offer the wearer the same basic surface diving functionality, but is there something else that makes automatic watches so much more expensive? Here are some key differences between automatic watch and quartz watch.

1. The timekeeping of the Timex Expedition Diver will be more accurate than that of the Oris Pro Diver over a period of 1 month. The reason for this is that the Timex watch uses battery power to charge a capacitor which then powers the watch movement, while an automatic watch uses the movement to charge a spring which releases energy to the watch movement. A high quality automatic watch movement has a margin of error of + or – 1 second per day compared to the variation of a quartz watch which is less than 1 second per year. Must this be the same?
2. The Oris watch uses Swiss mechanical engineering to produce each movement by hand, and each movement is quality tested before it can be shipped to retailers and sold to the general public. The Timex is machine produced in a factory in China and one watch in every 100 units is tested.
3. All Swiss manufacturers such as Oris use a unique serial number that allows the watch to be identified and each watch to be traced back to the point of sale and manufacture. Companies like Timex and Casio do not provide unique serial numbers due to the massive quantities of each item being created on a daily basis.
4. The automatic watch only requires maintenance every 3 to 5 years. The quartz watch will need a new battery every 2 to 5 years depending on the use of its functions.
5. The automatic watch will stop and need to be manually reset if it is left off the wrist for more than 40 hours. The quartz watch will continue to work until the battery fails or there is a mechanical failure.
6. There are minimal devices in the mechanical watch. There will be no on-board dive computer or dive logging facility, these functions can be found on quartz watches. Companies like Casio, Citizen, and Tissot make watches that have the ability to record data from your dives for use at a later date.

The key thing to think about is whether this dive watch will be a functional addition to the dive gear you already own, to give you dive data without having to buy a dive computer. If so, a digital watch will provide much of the information on its digital display, the key men’s watches for this are the Sea Touch and Citizen Pro master.

Or this watch to be something more than diving, this diving watch must be timeless and have the possibility of being used outside diving? If the answer to this question is yes, an automatic dive watch is a perfect addition to a watch collection and is a great status symbol as well as a useful piece of diving equipment.