Watch Opinon: Swatch’s Opening Gambit: It’s Your Move, Japan.

roadwarrior

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The 8215 is…well, it’s ugly

January 3, 2020


http://www.scottishwatches.co.uk/202...ur-move-japan/

Because it’s been written about at length, by myself and others, I won’t rehash it entirely, or in detail. Suffice to say that in the near term, unless and until we see more movement manufacturers stepping into the breach, and supplying the industry with more affordable mechanical movements, the uncertainty will remain, causing problems for many brands and their suppliers.

Swatch Group, in its current form, was born out of the Swiss solution to the quartz crisis, and the threat to the Swiss watch industry posed by Japan. It’s perhaps a poetic irony that Japan may now represent the best hope for many small brands…maybe. We’ll see…

Full disclosure – I’ve always admired the Japanese pursuit of perfection in all human endeavours. I like Japanese design, Japanese cars, all sorts of Japanese products and brands. I’ve long been a proponent of Japanese movements, which I’ve used extensively in watches my company has produced.

We’ve had a fantastic experience with both Seiko and Miyota (Citizen) movements, with defect rates typically just 0.1% to 0.2%. With the Chinese and Swiss movements we’ve used, the experience hasn’t been nearly as good, with much higher defect rates, despite the movements supposedly being “reliable”.

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Most watch enthusiasts realize that the early Japanese investment in developing quartz movements led to the quartz crisis in Switzerland, and set Japan up to be the leader in quartz technology. But what many tend to overlook is that Japan also makes amazing mechanical movements, and have arguably contributed as much as – and possibly more than – the Swiss have to the field of horology. The Japanese just haven’t made as big a noise about it.

Prior to 2010, if you owned an entry-level watch with a Japanese movement, especially the Miyota 8215 (or one of its many sibling calibres), or a Seiko NH25 (7s25, as it was called in Seiko’s own models), it would have been easy to dismiss Japanese movements as inferior to the workhorse Swiss calibre, the ETA 2824-2.

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Compared to the entry-level movements from Japan, the standard grade ETA was higher beat, generally more accurate, and generally seemed more “sophisticated”. The nearly 60-year old ETA design was “tried and true”, compared to the newer, less renowned, less respected, cheap Japanese upstarts.

Miyota dropped a bomb in 2010, in the form of the 9015. The new calibre was superior to the ETA in every objective way, a true game-changer.

It was high-beat, hacking and hand-winding, and wafer-thin, with a longer power reserve than the ETA, and adjusted to twice as many positions than the ETA. Best of all – it was only about half the price of the ETA when it was first introduced.

On paper, the accuracy specs aren’t amazing. But having used about 5,000 of them in our watches, I can assure you those specs are extremely conservative. The 9015 is amazingly accurate, right out of the box, with low positional variance, and is nearly immune to isochronism.

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French brand Lundis Bleus recently had a 9015-based watch tested by the Observatoire de Besançon in France, where it was certified as an observatory chronometer – a standard for accuracy requiring much more rigorous testing than the Swiss COSC certification.

The 9015 is also nicely decorated if you’re into that sort of thing. What’s more, the 9015’s design is elegant – making it easy to disassemble quickly. A close examination of the 9015’s parts reveals they’re extremely well-finished – better than ETA’s parts.

Not too long after the 9015 made its debut, Seiko came back to the party with a replacement for the NH25, in the form of the hacking and hand-winding NH35 (4r35), which quickly displaced the Miyota 8215 as the independent brand’s choice in entry-level, workhorse Japanese movements.

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jeez Louise...interesting that japanese population aging and declining is hitting the ability to produce more supply...

robots and population decline have accounted for lack of growth in capitalist countries of late...despite flood of E-Z money going back to the crash of "08...

KARNAC predicts cloudy chance of showers...I'm just watchin' not getting any clear signals about how all this shakes out...hot planet declining population...talking'bout devolution...watch out for HAL
 
I’ve got several eta and Miyota 9015. If I didn’t know the difference I wouldn’t know the difference. Miyota has always been one of my faves
 
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