Somebody will tell you, usually with great confidence and usually unprompted, that a quartz watch is not a real watch. It is worth knowing where that idea comes from before you let it talk you out of a piece you actually love — because a very large share of the most beautiful ladies’ watches ever made, the Cartier Tank you have wanted since you were nineteen among them, run on a battery.
The question is not whether quartz is somehow lesser. It is what choosing it costs you, honestly, in wearing and in what the piece is worth later.
Why does quartz have this reputation at all?
It is a hangover from the 1970s. Quartz arrived, it was cheap and accurate, and it very nearly finished the Swiss industry — so when mechanical watchmaking recovered, it did so by selling itself as craft against the machine. Collector culture grew out of that recovery, and collector culture is overwhelmingly male and overwhelmingly focused on movements.
The result is that the conventional wisdom about watches was written by people optimising for something you may not be optimising for. There is nothing wrong with caring about a movement. There is something wrong with being told it is the only legitimate thing to care about.
What does quartz actually give you day to day?
Three real advantages, and they are not trivial if you wear a watch rather than curate one.
It is right. A quartz watch keeps time to a few seconds a month. A good mechanical keeps time to a few seconds a day. If you have ever been quietly irritated that your watch is four minutes out again, that difference is the whole argument.
It does not need winding or wearing. A mechanical watch you wear twice a month is a watch you reset every time. Quartz sits in a drawer for six weeks and is still correct when you pick it up — which suits how most people actually own several pieces.
It can be thinner and smaller. This one matters more than it sounds. A quartz movement lets a maker build a genuinely slim 25mm or 28mm case that sits properly on a smaller wrist. A lot of the elegance in ladies’ watch design exists because of quartz, not despite it.
And what does it cost you?
Batteries, mainly, and a slightly different servicing rhythm. A battery every few years is not a burden, but it does mean the case is opened regularly — and every opening is a chance for a gasket to be refitted badly or a dial to be marked. Use someone competent. On a watch with a mother-of-pearl dial this matters more than the battery ever will.
The genuine long-term consideration is obsolescence. A mechanical movement can be rebuilt more or less indefinitely by any good watchmaker. A quartz movement from a discontinued line can, eventually, become difficult to replace. In practice, for the major houses, this is a distant problem rather than a live one — but it is the one honest point in favour of mechanical that is not about romance.
Does quartz hurt what the watch is worth?
Less than you have been told, and the reason is that the movement is rarely what people are buying. On a Cartier Tank, a Panthère or a Chanel J12, the value sits in the case, the name, the condition and the completeness. These are design objects with a movement inside, not movements with a case around them, and the market prices them accordingly.
Where a mechanical version genuinely commands more, it is usually because it is also the rarer, later or more expensively-cased variant — so you are seeing metal, size and scarcity, not the movement. Be sceptical of any flat percentage claiming quartz “loses” a set amount; the honest way to compare is like for like within the same model and the same metal, and on that basis the gap narrows dramatically or disappears.
We do not publish a quartz-versus-mechanical retention figure, because we do not hold data that would make one true. What we can say is what we see: condition and completeness move a price far more than a movement type does. None of this is investment advice, and values can fall.
So how should you choose?
Ask what you want the watch to do. If you want a piece to wear constantly, that is always right, that slips under a cuff and that you never have to think about, quartz is not a compromise — it is the correct engineering answer, and you should stop apologising for it.
If part of the pleasure is the object itself, the small mechanical heart of it, the winding as a morning ritual, then buy mechanical, because that pleasure is real too and quartz will not give it to you.
What you should not do is buy a movement you did not want to satisfy an argument you were never actually in.
Both run through the ladies’ pieces at Cartier, Chanel and Omega. Everything we list is authenticated and checked first, and the movement type is stated plainly rather than buried.
Last updated 2 September 2026.