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Watchmaking has some apparent fundamental dichotomies across which no bridge (apparently) can be thrown: in-house vs. ébauche, date window vs. no date window, 38mm or smaller vs. everything. Probably the most basic, of course, is quartz vs. mechanical – if connoisseurship is defined to some degree by what it rejects, the first thing budding watch connoisseurs generally do is reject quartz watches out of hand (I sure did). However, as with the in-house movement debate, it turns out that the reality is considerably more nuanced, as well as much more interesting, and watches that have a foot in both worlds make up a small but significant part of modern watchmaking history.
Of course, such watches can be very polarizing – the Seiko Spring Drive watches, for example, had a very uphill battle to find acceptance among serious watch enthusiasts but with the passage of time, and the telling of their story in greater detail, Spring Drive has become more and more accepted as part of the modern, fine watchmaking landscape. Seiko is not the only company that has combined some aspects of quartz technology with mechanical technology – one of the most explored alternatives to a pure mechanical or pure quartz watch has been in the production of chronographs, with Jaeger-LeCoultre's so-called mecha-quartz (or méca-quartz) chronograph caliber 631, which was developed in 1987, one of the better known examples.
https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/citiz ... ntroducing
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