Why are digital clocks popular while digital watches are not?
For me, at least, a watch is a fashion accessory, and most analog watches look prettier than digital ones…
On the other hand, clocks, like alarm clocks, are more functional, and digital displays are quicker to read.
Digital watches are superior where pure functionality counts like timing physical activity etc but for general dress wear digital watches typically (not always) are not as attractive as good analog watches although I have seen both dog ugly and attractive examples of both. Some of the better makes of the analog watches such as Patek Philippe -A. Lange & Söhne-Blancpain-IWC-Jaeger-LeCoultre etc (not Rolex!-nice cases but mediocre movements) have watches that are (IMO) more than a fashion accessory and rise to the level of high art from both an engineering and esthetic perspective.
Well I see plenty of digital watches. I prefer analog clocks and watches, just to be snobby, but for applications like alarm clocks where you don’t have the time or inclination at 4:36AM to figure out where the hell the minute hand is, a digital display is preferred.
I like my analog watch because I can tell direction with it!
I wear a digital watch simply because I don’t like the hassle of guessing exactly where the hands are in low-light conditions. I have also set my digital watch to the 24-hour clock, a system I much prefer over the AM/PM stupidity current these days.
I always wear a watch that tells the date, so that I can write checks easily at stores.
I have an analog with Roman numerals for looks, when I dress up, but prefer digital when I’m traveling, because I have a two-time-zone model.
Also, it’s far easier to read a digital at a glance, which I do a lot waiting for various transport.
As for clocks, I am like most of my friends, who have the Roman numeral wooden clocks, mantle clocks and grandfather clocks. Just a generational thing there, I suppose.
By the way, everyone who complains kids don’t get to learn analog is school has never looked in the windows. Every classroom in the US, it seems, has an analog clock over the teacher’s head, so kids can count down the minutes to the ending bell.
I can go to any drugstore and for $15- $20 get a watch that keeps time to a second per month or better, is shock and water resistant, and runs for years on one battery. What’s not to like? Plus, a lot of the analog watches are analog display, with digital workings. Does anyone actually bother with gears and mainsprings anymore?
I suppose you can buy a digital watch with a LCD face that’ll show analog hands. 
Or for that matter, if circuitry keeps shrinking you’ll be able to buy disposable stick-on watches like temporary tatoos. 
My dream watch: A paper-thin system implanted under the skin that tells time, date, your pulse and temperature, external temperature, and is linked to satellites to provide exact time without needing to set it. You’d be able to have it give you a small shock to wake you up (alarm clock from hell, all right) and physicians/EMTs would know at a glance what your pulse and temperature was. Maybe a larger module attached to the system would have a small artery running through it, so it could determine blood pressure, cholesterol, PO2, etc. without the need for bloodwork or specialized tools. Hey, just a thought.
Back to the OP: I think digital watches caught on for one reason: They’re as cheap as hell. A factory in Singapore can crank out thousands of them a day, each one probably more accurate than the average person would ever need them to be and very easy to read. If one breaks, you can junk it and buy a new one. Not so with mechanical/electromechanical watches, which are less accurate (those with mainsprings, at least), more expensive, and more complex to produce (a cheap digital watch is just a cheap IC with some output wires, a small quartz crystal, some buttons, a cheap LCD panel, and a battery assembly, the rest being cheap plastic). Plus, any idiot can read a digital watch without putting much thought into it.
Analog watches and clocks are used because an analog gauge is a better user interface than a number. Most digital clocks are found in bedside clock-radios, and the prime mover there is the ease of lighting the numbers at night.
Any time you have a display that shows a value in relation to other normal values, you’re probably better off with an analog display. The brain interprets it better. When you glance at an analog watch and see that it is about twenty after eight, your brain takes a snapshot of the display and you get an instant sense of how much time is left before bed, work, whatever. When you look at a watch and see 8:22, it takes you a second to interpret what the number really means.
This applies to things like speedometers as well. These days, it would be cheaper if the car companies could put all digital displays in our dashboards, but people vastly prefer looking at analog gauges. If you look at the temperature guage and see a needle hover 2/3 of the way between cold and redline, it tells you something about the state of the engine that is hard to get if you just look at a number like ‘228’.
In some extreme cases, engineers use all digital sensors for accuracy yet still convert the output to an analog dial for ease of interpretation.
I don’t buy it, Sam. With digital, you can get an accuracy you can’t get from an analog display. People want to be accurate about time, especially since the Industrial Revolution. So digital watches have won out over analog in that way in addition to the price issue. About the analog gauges in cars: Those gauges are directly linked to mechanical systems inside the engine and on the axle, making an analog output the natural result of an analog input. Only recently, with the increased use of microcomputers in cars, has it been possible to give a digital output. So the analog display panel is not a user preference but a mechanical one.
Derleth wrote:
Boy, I strongly disagree with that statement. Car manufacturers started making digital dashboards about 15 years ago, but they hardly sell any anymore, because it’s much quicker for the brain to process a needle that’s a little past where the “70” mark is (which you’ve already memorized anyway) than to read the digits and process it that way.
If digital dashes were better for driving, you’d be seeing them on high-end race cars, where price is no object. But race cars all use analog gauges.
Digital watches were wildly and faddishly popular for some time when it was still a novelty. The early Pulsar LED watches were not durable but in '79 I was willing to part with almost half a month’s salary for a digital Seiko. Now I wear a more honest Seiko, an all mechanical, analog, self-winding model. Digtial may make a better stopwatch but I can tell the time quicker on an analog face.
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- I have an analog (face) watch because I can get one with glow-in-the-dark hands and I don’t have to mess with it to see the time in the dark. I couldn’t find a digital watch that could do that at any price. I usually have the wrong date on checks for about the first week of every month though, because the analog date-wheel doesn’t adjust automatically for the different months and for about that long, neither do I. - MC
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http://www.ieee-uffc.org/freqcontrol/marrison/Marrison.html
Read all about the development of digital watches.
CurtC said "because it’s much quicker for the brain to process a needle that’s a little past where the “70” mark is (which you’ve already memorized anyway) than to read the digits and process it that way. "
You are dead on correct CurtC. At one time I designed both analog and digital instruments, so I have a certain familiarity with the subect. Every study I am familiar with agrees with your statement. The brain processes the position of pointers much faster than it does numbers.
Yes. My watch is mechanical. Some people probably think it’s silly (or insane) to spend over 100 times the cost of a quartz watch for something that’s never going to be as accurate as a quartz watch and provides the same information. But I like the smooth sweep of the second hand better than the stop-and-go “Tick. Tick. Tick.” of a quartz analog. I like the big dial, and the heavy case and bracelet. I like the way it looks.
I recently overhauled my dad’s Seiko Bellmatic. I’m sure I spent more than it cost new. But it’s a beautiful watch and it was dad’s. Mechanical, self-winding, with an alarm, day and date. I wore it for a couple of years and people commented on it. But if you screwed up the date, it was a bitch to wind it round and round through the month to get back to the right date.
And dad’s previous watch, a Vulcain “Cricket” is nearing completion of an overhaul. This one has to be wound by hand, as it isn’t automatic. It has a fairly loud alarm on it. I’ll wear that one too, when it gets out of the shop.
So yes; people still bother with mainsprings and gears. The tradition is alive and well, and there seems to be a re-discovery of mechanical watches. You can get a fake Rolex w/automatic movement from Invicta for $95 (or pay $239 for the same watch from the Home Shopping Channel); or you can pay five or six figures for an exclusive Swiss watch (not a Rolex, generally; contrary to poular belief, Rolexes are not very expensive… relatively speaking). I don’t track market trends but there seems to be an upsurge in the number of self-winding or stem-wind watches being sold: TAG-Heuer, Breitling, Omega, Rolex, the company that Vulcain became, and a few less-expensive brands like Invicta all have mechanical watches that are selling well.
Derleth: The problem with your statement is that digital watches are NOT more accurate, because the source of inaccuracy is not in interpreting the dial, but in setting the watch, natural drift of the watch after being set, etc. In fact, one could argue that an analog dial is MORE ‘accurate’, because it leads people to include the other possible errors in their interpretation of it.
I used to get a kick out of guys with their digital watches who would, when asked the time, say something like - “It’s 8:23, and 30 seconds EXACTLY”. Sorry, sparky. Unless that happens to be the exact time at Greenwich at that second, it’s wrong. You would get a more accurate time from someone who said, “It’s almost 25 after 8”.
One area where digital displays are excellent are stopwatches and other interval timers where the values don’t have to be calibrated to an external source, and where accuracy in reading the exact interval is of primary importance.
As for the mechanical linkage stuff - trust me, it’s a lot cheaper to do it digitally these days. A digital speedometer can be built for about $5. Put a shaft encoder on the wheel (a plastic disk, LED, and an optical sensor will work, or you can get fancy), a pulse counter, and an LED display. Voila, you have a speedometer that would be more accurate than the analog dial you now have, and probably weigh and cost about 1/10 of what the analog system does.
The reason cars don’t have digital gauges is simple: People HATE them. The Corvette came out with a digital speedo over a decade ago, and the critics slammed it. Since then, GM has been tinkering around with different digital displays that give you the same visual cues as an analog dial, with some success. My favorite is the digital tach that is actually a whole bunch of LCD segments strung together in an analog fashion, and curved to match the power curve of the engine. But even that has its problems.
Go look at the dashboards of the world’s ‘supercars’ - Lamborgini, Ferrari, etc. I don’t think you’ll find a single digital gauge in any of them, other than for things like air temperature.