Its appeal will be strongest to those who are emotionally moved by achievements in high precision timekeeping. (Tighter tolerances will produce more consistent performance, but as is usually the case, it's more expensive.) This combined with some of the other technical features of the Caliber 0100 make it, at least for now, technically unique.įrom a practical perspective this is all a bit moot, of course – most wristwatch owners won't especially notice the difference between ☑0 seconds a year, and ☑ second a year, but this watch is not for most wristwatch owners (both in terms of performance and price). The industry standard practice for AT quartz crystals specifies the angle of deviation of the cut from the Z axis of the crystal (for instance) to within 0.0042 of a degree and the angle of the cut can be varied slightly in order to alter the rate stability of the crystal in a given temperature range to the desired spec. But there is a big difference between getting lucky in terms of performance, and being able to guarantee performance over that long a period. I have a Citizen Eco-Drive Skyhawk that's probably nine or ten years old and when I first got it I measured its accuracy over the course of a year and it was slow by three seconds over 365 days. Now, depending on things like temperature, variation in quartz crystal performance, and other imponderables, you may very well get one second a year performance out of a watch not rated to that accuracy. This is with the caveat that you can get better performance from wristwatches that calibrate themselves using radio frequency signals, either from terrestrial transmitters or from the GPS network, but these are not completely autonomous timekeepers, like the Caliber 0100. High frequency quartz watches are a fascinating sub-speciality of watch collecting – companies as varied as Omega, Bulova, Seiko, and Citizen itself have all produced such watches, both in the present and the past as far as I can recall the record holder for quartz accuracy until today was actually the aforementioned Citizen Crystron. But it's a major assertion of thought leadership on the part of Citizen to have produced this watch, and to have guaranteed the level of performance it provides, and though there are other firms that hypothetically could have done it, the fact remains that Citizen is the company that put in the work, and did the R&D, necessary to make this a reality. Forty-four years later, the energy problem's been solved thanks to the Caliber 0100's use of solar-power, Eco-Drive technology, which gives the watch a six month power reserve (eight months in power-save mode) and it's worth noting that this is despite the fact that Caliber 0100 runs at about double the frequency of the Crystron. (The watch will run indefinitely if exposed to light on a regular basis the six month power reserve is the running time if the watch is kept in total darkness).ĪT cut quartz crystals were invented in 1938, and while Citizen's Eco-Drive tech is class-leading, other large watchmaking companies with semiconductor capacities also have the ability to deploy similar technology. It was however, an incredible feat for its time, and like the Caliber 0100, it used an AT-cut quartz crystal. That watch was rated to a still-amazing ☓ seconds per year, but the short battery life was a commercial liability. The single biggest problem with high-accuracy, high frequency quartz watches historically has been battery life higher frequency quartz oscillators use a lot of power and when Citizen came out with its 4.1 MHz Crystron Megaquartz in 1975, expected battery life was only about six months (according to Citizen).
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