The advent of quartz watches – more accurate, more durable, and eventually much cheaper than mechanical watches – dramatically and permanently altered the way most people tell time. Interestingly enough, the ubiquity of accurate time from cell phones, fitness trackers, and everything else, from your TV to your microwave, has had a similar effect on quartz watches, which though still sold in the millions, are no longer really necessary. The result has been a kind of dumbing down of the quartz watch over the years – development of better accuracy in quartz timekeeping has become something of a niche pursuit, with just a handful of makers pursuing it.
It’s a fairly short list. Bulova makes its high frequency Precisionist watches; there are the 9F caliber quartz Grand Seikos; Citizen makes its domestic-market-only, ± 5 seconds-per-year Chronomaster; Breitling has its Superquartz movements ; and there are others, with these just being some of the more notable contenders. In the past, there were a wider variety of attempts to make cutting-edge, high-precision quartz watches. Everything from Omega’s quartz Marine Chronometer, which was the first marine chronometer wristwatch, to a range of high frequency models from Seiko and Citizen, to Pulsar’s PSR-10 (± 10 seconds per year accuracy) vied for attention and consumer dollars. One of the most interesting was the long-forgotten cheap replica Longines VHP – a Very High Precision watch made in the 1980s and 1990s that offered ± 10 second per year precision.
The original VHP was first introduced in 1984, and Longines and its partner, Asulab, continued to develop the movement over the next decade or so. One of the biggest contributors to rate drift in quartz watches is temperature variation, and the VHP had a thermocompensated movement; later models included a perpetual calendar and 10 year lithium battery. Like many manufacturers, however, Longines found that consumer demand for this degree of accuracy was a bit of a niche business, and the VHP was eventually discontinued. Today, however, it’s back.
The new watches are very much technically in the spirit of the original VHP timepieces. The biggest talking point of course, is accuracy: the new replica best watches Longines VHP models are guaranteed to within ± 5 seconds per year, which puts them in a very small group. Citizen’s Chronomaster springs to mind, but even most other high precision quartz movements max out at ± 10 seconds per year (your mileage may vary, of course) and typically quartz watches without TCXO (temperature compensated crystal oscillators) are about an order of magnitude less accurate, at ± 10-15 seconds variation per month (as an interesting side note, a properly adjusted mechanical watch can beat that, especially if you’re lucky with the regulation, but it’s not something you should expect. Rolex’s Superlative Chronometer standard promises ± 2 seconds per day, so at worst you’d be a minute off at the end of the month, unless a gain on the wrist was offset by, for instance, a loss at night when the watch is off the wrist).
These watches will be offered initially in a three-hand-and-date variation, with two dial treatments, and as chronographs, also with two different dial treatments. The three-hand versions can be had in 41 or 43mm case sizes, and the chronograph, in 42mm or 44mm cases. Additional features include a very interesting-sounding “gear position detection” system, which allows the hands to be re-aligned should they become displaced by a shock or a strong magnetic field, a perpetual calendar, and a five year battery life. Water resistance is 50 meters. Buy fake Longines watches online shop.
Prices will be extremely reasonable for technically advanced quartz time-keeping – 950 CHF (approximately $940 at time of publishing) for the three-hand models, and 1,550 CHF (approximately $1,530) for the chronographs. This degree of sophistication in quartz timekeeping will likely remain something of a niche market but I think high accuracy quartz has its own, unique kind of intellectual beauty and satisfaction and I hope these will find an audience.