Yes, Parnis. I haven’t had any trouble with them other than the clasp on the outside no longer tightening correctly. They’re fun, but I stopped wearing them since people actually mistake them for real Panerai, which makes me feel like I’m intending to wear a fake (I actually just like the look).
Can you quantify “crap” in a self-winding mechanism? Does it mean that it’s very inaccurate, or likely to break soon?
I have a Seiko automatic that cost $150 new and I’ve been wearing it for a bit over a year. It’s accurate closer than 1 minute a week which is as close as I can reasonably measure. I often have to set it on Monday morning because I don’t always wear it on the weekend and its stored energy results in it stopping sometime late Sunday night.
Yeah, I don’t agree. If he said for under $100, maybe. But then, Seiko 5’s are perfectly good automatic watches and you can get them for under $100. For a little more you can get automatic watches with full hacking and stem winding movements. For example, the Seiko 4R36 movement can be found in a range of watches starting at about $150. The 6R15 is an upgrade with better accuracy (-+15s/day), a 50 hr power reserve, and you can find watches with it starting around $400.
BTW, the Seiko 5 7S26 movement should be accurate to about 25 seconds per day. If that accuracy is good enough for you and you don’t need hacking or stemwinding, Seiko 5 watches are perfectly good.
I have been wearing my Seiko 5 for probably 10 years or so, pretty much 24 hours per day, and it’s never been serviced. I could get it regulated to keep more accurate time, but it’s probably not worth it for a watch this cheap. Cheaper to buy a new Seiko 5 than to service a Rolex.
Just for reference I have a mid-range watch (about $300) with a battery quartz movement that loses about 5 seconds a month. (That’s significantly better than my mechanical Rolex.) I don’t know what Stranger meant by “crap”, but it’s hard for me to think that resetting the time every couple of days is acceptable accuracy.
Always heard good things about the Seiko 5s and the Tissots.
But while at it, may I say, all you people who are noticing losses of under a minute a month, well, daaamn… Now, of course, sure, I don’t blame **Stranger **at all, if you’re a steely eyed missile man timing reentry burns you *want *that Omega Caliber 321 Speedmaster Pro 
But for those of us merely seeking to not arrive late to the dentist and not have to be looking at the cellphone all the time, something whose price runs equal or less than one month’s car payment will probably do the job just fine.
Everybody knows that quartz watches are more accurate than mechanical watches. And if you want perfect accuracy, there are cheap watches out there that use the WWV time source to update themselves, and are therefore close to atomic clock accuracy. You can even get such watches with solar power so you don’t have to change the batteries.
No one buys a mechanical watch because they think it will keep time even as well as a $20 Casio. They buy them because they like the mechanical movements. A beautiful mechanical watch is a little piece of art you can wear on your wrist.
But a $10,000 Rolex will not keep time as well as a $100 quartz watch. If your only criterion for a wach is that it has the most accurate time reading possible, don’t buy a mechanical watch.
But it does call into question exactly what ‘crap’ means in this regard. What is the standard for evaluating a mechanical watch when even the best of them isn’t as accurate as a cheap Casio? I think for many people it’s the fine workmanship. If you are the kind of person that grts excited by the switchgear in a BMW instead of a Ford, the you are someone who might appreciate the fine workmanship of a Rolex or a Brietling. A Seiko 5 might therefore be considered a piece of assembly line ‘crap’. But since both watches cannot stand up to the accuracy of that Casio, ‘crap’ is not exactly an obiective measure.
Seiko SKX line is under 200 bucks and plays a part in hundreds of thousands of collections put together by people who avoid so-called ‘crap’ watches/movements. These ‘beater’ watches are so-called because the price is low enough not to worry about them (the case isn’t precious) but the movements are considered to be tough as nails.
Miyota and Seiko movements of assorted varieties, which are considered robust, reliable and accurate are found in many watches under 200 USD.
The OP received answers such as Hamilton, Tissot, Seiko, etc. Sellita and ETA are Swiss brands, just as examples, and they make ranges of movements that range from ok to great, and find their way into Hamilton and Tissot.
Swiss Made = 60% of watch VALUE comes from Switzerland. Numerous parts are sourced from other countries.
Others: Glycine, Bulova,.
I just searched for Citizen’s WWV Eco-Drive watches and there are over 90 different models (many are discontinued): https://www.citizenwatch.com/us/en/search?q=atomic. They are typically in the $400-$900 range.
For mechanical watches, how accurate are the good ones? A few seconds a month? A few minutes a month?
Quartz watches are accurate to about 15 seconds a month: Quartz clock - Wikipedia.
Yea - I have Timex watches that have been going strong for years! I still have the Timex watch my grandma gave me when I was 8 back in 1969. Still works.
I catch a train to get to work. The difference between arriving a minute before the train and a minute after the train is huge. And the train almost never leaves before the schedule says it will. (And it’s often “on time”.) So yeah, I want my watch to be accurate to the minute, maybe a bit better than that.
As others have said, there are tons of quartz watches that are accurate enough for my needs that are cheap.
I liked Timex watches, until I got two bad ones in a row. By “bad”. I mean they worked for less than 3 years. I think the quality has dropped.
Honestly, any of those seem fine. It’s not like a wristwatch is anyone’s primary timekeeper any more. I’m not using it to time sprinters. I’m using it as a piece of jewelry that also saves me a little time pulling my phone out of my pocket to see how long it is until lunch.
My wristwatch could tell the time in 5-minute increments only and it would still serve my purposes just fine.
Obviously, that’s not true of everyone, but I bet it’s true of a lot of people.
Anything within 10 seconds a day accuracy is very good.
Elite level of accuracy is +2/-2.
Temp, use and other variables will see these numbers drift.
Quartz battery watches have batteries. You can decide whether the environmental impact is worth the accuracy. There are billions of these batteries out there. Mechanical watches are manual or kinetic. Most mechanical watches favor running fast. … and after a few weeks, their owners are minute or two early.
Generally, fans of mechanical watches will just check/set the the time every few days.
Rolex is currently advertizing that their watches are now accurate to ±2 seconds per day before they leave the factory. They used to be about ±4 seconds per day. I think that’s about the best you are going to find in a new mechanical watch. Typical cheaper watches like the mid-range Seiko movements are more like -+15 seconds per day, and the cheap $100 watches, about 25 seconds per day.
And the watch will likely lose some of that accuracy over time between services. I would consider those kind of numbers to be the absolute maximum accuracy you can hope for from a mechanical watch, and a normal watch that’s been in service for a while will be somewhat worse.
So no, not as accurate as a quartz watch.
And give themselves way more than one minute’s margin to make their train 
A COSC certified chronometer has to be accurate to -4/+6 seconds a day. However, my Sinn easily beats that (despite not being COSC certified) to holding within ~0.5 s per day, which is within the range of quartz watches in terms of accuracy. That is exceptional, but a good quality mechancial self-winding watch in good service that is being worn consistently should be able to hold to +/- 2 sec/day. Having to adjust a watch weekly just to stay within the minute range or compensate for broad sweeps of accuracy is just not acceptable.
Quartz watches can vary more (especially if exposed to temperature extremes) but generally should be able to meet that +/- 15 sec/mo. A good quality quartz watch will also take a lot more abuse, and a well-build digital quartz watch like a Casio G-Shock is essentially industructable to any conditions that won’t also kill the wearer, hence why you find Special Forces guys wearing those in the field and leaving their expensive mechanical watches for off-duty wear. (“Since MI6 looks for maladjusted young men who give little thought to sacrificing others in order to protect queen and country. You know, former SAS types with easy smiles and expensive watches. Rolex?” “Omega.”)
I’ve never been big on wearing a watch as jewelry, or a fan of those ginormous faced watches with a bunch of ugly and often non-functional complications, but I do need a watch for timekeeping because I am often not able to carry my cell phone in certain places, and plus I never trust any electronic device to not fail at the worst possible moment (hence why I carry a mechanical timer and depthy gage in addition to dive computer when diving, and an analog compass and map in addition to GPS unit). A relatively inexpensive quartz watch would do as well, but I appreciate the engineering as well as the classic appearance that goes into watches I wear, so while I wear a tough and reliable digital quartz watch in the backcountry, I like a good mechanical watch for daily wear, and especially one that isn’t an obvious fashion choice or worn just to impress people that you have a popular name brand.
Stranger
One thing about batteries - if you are a watch collector and have a dozen or more watches, if they aren’t mechanical you’ll be changing batteries a lot. I have a dress watch that I never wear, because I only have need to wear it once every few years, and then when I do the battery is invariably dead. So now I don’t even bother with it.
You may want to try this video: Top 10 Best Value Watches under $200.
And the comments are right, this guy looks a lot like Willem Defoe.
Oh, definitely. I have 2 watches, my daily wear Breitling Aerospace (a gift), and when I might get messy or physical I put on my Citizen Eco Drive (about $100). My backup watch used to be a Casio quartz, but I wear the backup watch so infrequently that I got tired of changing batteries every year or two for wearing a watch maybe 10x. So I gave it to my son and got the Citizen. Voila, no batteries.
The battery in my Breitling lasts about 3-4 years, which is good.
Thanks for this, Stranger, very helpful. Your Sinn is quite remarkable, being so accurate. I hack my watches regularly to time.gov. I want to be accurate within 5-10 seconds always, so I doubt I’d be happy with a mechanical watch. Still, I know my old Hamilton military watch is around somewhere, it’s probably buried in the garage, and I’d like to find it one day. I got that back in the 1980s, when I was in.
Not gonna happen. Quartz watch technology rocks.