The Breitling Watch Source Forums

Any articles anyone recommends on superquartz? Would like to know more about this. Do watches with superquartz have a 'ticking' secondhand (yes, I know mechanical watches tick to an extent also).

Basically how does superquartz differ from quartz? Thanks

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End of Discussion.

Superquartz is thermocompensated. Bottomline, they are more accurate and they tick, if they have a second hand. My Airwolf ticks, but the Aerospace does not.

One thing that sucks with Breitling superquartz... they require battery replacement on much more often than than a mechanical requires service.

R/

There are a few threads on here that talk about Superquartz, but basically as Rebel_1 said they are thermocompensated quartz movements. (A quick search on Google for "Thermocompensated quartz" throws up some good information).

But briefly -

All movements are susceptible to changes of temperature and quartz is no exception. The idea of thermocompensation is to (funnily enough!) compensate for changes in temperature, so ensuring the watch keeps even better time, and this is acheived with an additional piece of ensor circuitry. As this increases the accuracy, it allows quartz movements to be Chronometer rated. Given the far greater accuracy of even the cheapest quartz compared to even the most expensive of mechanical watches, the Chronometer rating criteria for quartz is extremely stringent : an average daily rate of just +/-0.07 secs per day (i.e. 26 seconds per year).

Although Breitling are very big on thermocompensation (or Superquartz as they like to call it) in order to ensure their entire range is Chronometer rated, high-end quartz is still something of a niche market, even within the WIS world. That said, I guess it's something like super-deep WR ratings : 99.9% of people will never need it in a million years....., but that doesn't mean it's not a cool thing to have!

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Driver8

Site Moderator

To expand on this (and this is my layperson's understanding, subject to layperson's error): In a typical quartz movement, a quartz crystal is exposed to current, and vibrates at 32.768 kHz (or 32,768 vibrations per second). A microprocessor counts the number of vibrations, and registers a "tick" of the second hand for every 32,768 vibrations counted. (This assumes it's an analog watch; for digital, the same principle applies, only the elapsed second is registered on the display, rather than via a hand). The problem is that the frequency at which a quartz crystal vibrates varies with temperature. So, if the temperature causes the crystal to vibrate more slowly, it will take longer for the processor to register the 32,768 vibrations, meaning a "second" actually takes longer than a second; and vice versa for temperatures causing the crystal to vibrate at a faster rate. In a standard quartz movement, the microprocessor doesn't know the difference - it counts 32,768, whether it takes exactly a second, or less, or more. In a typical thermocompensated quartz movement (there are actually different methods of thermocompensation), there is additional circuitry that measures the temperature, calculates how much more slowly or quickly the crystal is vibrating per second than the standard rate, and adjusts the required number of vibrations to advance the second hand. That's the long and the short of it. For a much more in-depth explanation, see this excellent, but lengthy, writeup on WUS.

I have to wonder how necessary thermocompensation is. In theory, it's awesome technology. Given the relative rarity of COSC certified quartz movements, Breitling's Superquartz has a cachet all its own. However, I have a basic quartz TAG that is typically accurate to within 1-2 seconds a month, which is almost on a level with thermocompensated quartz. Maybe that's not typical, and I just got lucky with a particularly good specimen of a movement. Or it could be that the circumstances in which I wear it just don't present enough temperature variation to make a huge difference in accuracy. Perhaps in more extreme uses, I'd see a bigger variance. Which leads back to my question: how helpful is thermocompensation for the average watch wearer? Does one need to be in the elements on a regular basis for it to really make much of a difference?

The man's learned well

The variations are really the dirty little secret of thermo compensation. If you measure a quartz vs. thermocompensated quartz while changing the temperature the variations are measurable as long as you have an accurate enough measuring device. However, in a real world situation, over a period of time the variations from the 'norm' will cancel one another out - i.e. the faster beats at a higher temperature will be offset by the slower beats at a lower temperature.

Additionally, the improvements that thermo compensation bring are so slight that to the majority of wearers they aren't particularly relevant - we are talking something like 1 Hz adjustment every 15 minutes or so (or an adjustment factor of 0.0000034%).