Quartz is more accurate and maintenance-free; automatic is mechanical, endlessly repairable and kept for a lifetime. The choice is not about technology but about what you expect from a watch: a reliable instrument you forget about, or an object that lives.
A battery sends current through a quartz crystal that vibrates 32,768 times per second. A circuit counts these vibrations and moves the hand one step per second, hence that characteristic ticking motion. It is simple, cheap to produce and extremely accurate.
No electronics, no battery. A rotor pivots with the movements of your wrist and winds a mainspring. That spring releases its energy through a gear train regulated by a balance wheel oscillating several times per second, which gives that smoothly sweeping seconds hand. Everything that drives the hand is mechanical and visible.
Quartz wins by a mile: around 15 seconds of deviation per month. A series automatic is more in the range of a few seconds per day. In practice, that means resetting your automatic watch once or twice a month. If that annoys you, quartz is for you.
Quartz needs a battery change every two to three years, and that is all, until the day the electronic circuit fails and becomes unreplaceable. An automatic needs a service every five to seven years, but every part can be replaced, indefinitely. That is why people inherit mechanical watches and almost never battery ones.
An entry-level quartz watch has a life expectancy of ten to fifteen years, limited by its circuit. A well-maintained automatic movement runs for decades. It is the most concrete argument in favour of mechanical.
At an equal budget, a quartz watch allows more exterior finishing, since the movement costs less. An automatic concentrates a large share of its price in the mechanism. A well-built automatic at 250 francs does exist, provided the brand does not spend everything on advertising.
A seconds hand that sweeps without jerking is visible from a metre away. It is the first detail that people who know watches notice, and it is what visually separates a mechanical watch from a supermarket one.
It is a hybrid: timekeeping is handled by a quartz module, but the chronograph functions are mechanical, with an instant hand reset and a real click under the finger. It offers the best of both worlds on chronographs, at a price unreachable in full mechanical.
We build automatic watches on Seiko movements because that is what gives an affordable watch a chance to last and to be repairable anywhere in the world. A Seiko movement can be regulated by any watchmaker, with no exotic parts to order. It is a choice of longevity, not of chronometric performance.
No, but it is more sensitive to violent shocks and magnetic fields than a quartz. In normal daily use, the difference is invisible.
For it to stay on time, yes, or wind it by hand. It stops after about 40 hours without movement. See our instructions.
From around 250 francs, you get a proven automatic movement with a sapphire crystal and 316L steel. Below that, you almost always trade away the glass or the movement. See the models under 250 CHF.