Give it a try, and leave behind the thought that foregoing mechanical is a slight to the watchmaking art. It’s all part of the contrarian cool of quartz. How’s that for provenance? You can buy a GP watch with the Caliber 350 for well under $1,000 today. It was such an improvement at the time that it has since become the standard used by a quartz watches today. Released in 1971, the 350 was the first quartz watch with a crystal occulting at 32,768 hertz, which made it more accurate than its contemporaries and gave it a longer battery life, to boot. Yes, the Swiss brand known for their award-winning triple-bridge tourbillons was a leader in developing the modern quartz movement. Take for instance the Girard-Perregaux Caliber 350. The market was flooded with quartz watches in the early ‘70s, so there are plenty of lovely Japanese and Swiss quartz timepieces from that era looking for a new home. As such, quartz watches are less fragile, holding up to shock better than their mechanical counterparts, and are cheaper and easier to service over their lifetime, only (rarely) requiring cleaning and lubricating the movement and changing the battery. But the simpler, cheaper movement can and should be collected - the Occam’s-Razor approach to the quartz movement means that there’s far fewer moving parts to go wrong. This is a simple reason why so many enthusiasts tend to resent the quartz watch. When the first quartz watch, the Seiko Astron, came to market in 1969, it ushered in countless cheap battery-powered watches, effectively killing the mechanical watch industry until the ’90s. Which brings me back to the quartz watch, the unloved overachiever of the watch industry. The Girard-Perregaux Caliber 350 was a leader in the the early development of quartz watches. A sub-$200 eBay purchase, on the other hand, is a completely different game. While a mechanical watch bought from a competent watchmaker can last you a lifetime so long as it’s been regularly serviced by equally competent repairers, you can also expect to pay four to five figures for something that’s been properly vetted as both authentic and in tip-top shape. Christie’s watch expert Eric Wind told Business of Fashion in 2016 the market is seeing “unprecedented interest.” But of course, as demand goes up so do prices. I couldn’t give you a specific model name for the fourth watch, but I can tell you three things about it: it’s a Seiko, it’s powered by quartz (unlike the other three), and, aside from a handful of battery changes, it has run flawlessly since my dad bought it in the mid-‘80s. There are currently four vintage watches on my bedside table: a Seiko 5 from the ’80s that, god bless it, runs pretty damn well for a $25 mechanical watch a ‘70s Orient King Diver that, when wound, is incredibly inaccurate and a 1977 Seiko 6139 “Helmet” chronograph that hasn’t run since I was an intern.

Seiko quartz chronograph vintage