For as long as I can remember I've had inexpensive quartz watches that never lost a minute. For my 60 birthday, my wife and I bought me a quartz Seamaster AT and have had it for about 5 months. it's already lost a minute. Is this to be expected?

 

A quartz watch of that quality should run closer than that. The Omega quartz movements with which I am most familiar have a trimmer which allows some regulation. Lesser quality watches are not necessarily adjustable. If the watch is new from an Omega dealer or Omega boutique, and you still have your warranty, it would be smart to have it adjusted.

 

I would drop by an Omega Boutique anyway. Maybe they can adjust it directly there…

 

Your watch is well within Omegas tolerances for non thermo-compensated movements, which is - 0.5 - +0.7 seconds per day.
I would live with it.

 

Perhaps it is within range, but most folks would prefer a slight GAIN rather than a LOSS. It should be possible with the right equipment, to regulate it for a gain, rather than a loss.

 

No, not possible. Modern quartz movements like the Cal. 1538 in this watch don’t use trimmers...

 

As I said in my post, the Omega quartz movements I am most familiar with use a trimmer for regulation. Now I know. I find it odd that the ETA caliber 255.112 (which was the basic caliber that was also used in Omega) was equipped with a trimmer. But the newer Omega quartz calibers aren’t.

 

Glad to have helped

 

Wow... I never had any Omega quartz, but it seems a bit disappointing if it is 'normal' for it to loose 1 minute in 5 months.

I once had a cheap Seiko kinetic (like 120-130 bucks) and it gained 1s... in 6 months!

I would expect similar performance (or better) from omega.
:-(

 

This is not a realistic expectation.

Keep in mind that even the best and most expensive HAQ watches (High Accuracy Quartz, typically thermocompensated) are those that keep time to within +/- 10 seconds per year, so your Seiko is absolutely exceptional if it is keeping time to within 1 seconds every 6 months. Using a one off exceptional example with extraordinary accuracy as your benchmark is going to leave you disappointed in pretty much any other quartz watch.

Tolerance for the Cal. 1538 is -9 to +15 seconds per month. Note that movements will perform within those tolerances and the performance will be distributed on a bell curve, so the number of watches that are at the extremes like the OP's will be less frequent than those that run much closer. For the sake of illustration I checked my files and randomly picked a model that I know has a Cal. 1538 inside to see what the daily rate was:



So the rate here is +0.08 seconds/day. This translates to about +2.5 seconds in a month or so, which is quite good for a quartz movement of this quality.

Cheers, Al

 

I think it is a bit too much 1 minute in 5 months, I had a Aquaterra quartz and it lost around 30/40 second after more that 1 year.

 

When a new poster registers on OF to complain about the accuracy of a mechanical watch my default answer is “buy a quartz”

Now we have a new member registering to complain about the accuracy of a quartz watch thats within 1 minute over 5 months.

My suggestion: “Get some Paxil”

 

Why must people compare the accuracy of a single watch to another single watch and draw such conclusions? That's not the way it works. Life is a probabilistic game.

 

@Archer: thanks for the information, that is really interesting!


I think +/- 15s/year would be pretty fine for a quartz, but -120s/year (or minus 2 minutes) wouldn't be ok for me.

 

Well since +/- 10 per year represents the top of the line in current quartz watches, if you don't want to rely on finding an outlier, you need to consider nothing other than HAQ for your next purchases then...

 

Or look for a 40 year old Seamaster pre-bond with the 1441 movement. Cheap as chips at the moment.
Plus or minus 10 seconds per annum standard, tweakable to 5.

 

The tolerance for this movement is also -9 to +15 seconds per month. It can be adjusted however...

 

sounds like someone needs a GPS watch...

 

^^^ Well aware of that, but this is the current spec per Omega Work Instruction 18: