What does it take for one to spend about $7,000 – $10,000 (or more) on a quartz chronograph watch? And I mean an educated watch lover who knows about movements and isn’t just buying for looks? Is there such a watch? Maybe… and maybe it is something like this Quinting Mysterious Chronograph. Certainly a rare breed, Quinting is a Swiss brand that makes all quartz movements, I mean mysterious quartz movements.
The Quinting Mysterious Chronograph is really of the more complicated watches that Quinting makes. The actual name of it is pretty strange as it is called the “Quinting Chronograph Mysterious Quinting.” Don’t ask, I don’t understand either. The movements they produce are actually located in the bezel of the watch and involve a series of motors that turn sapphire crystal discs. The discs move the hands. As the chronograph models have a lot of hands, the watch movement gets really complicated. The chronograph movement for example utilizes 13 separate discs in the dial. You can see right through the dial to your wrist, and the entire mechanism is hidden in the periphery of the watch case – neat.
For some hands-on images you can check out this previous article I did with Quinting timepieces. One thing I still don’t get is how you read the AM/PM indicator and date. The scales are located on the flange ring, but what do you use to read it? The centrally mounted hand should be for the chronograph hours and seconds. The only thing I can guess is that pressing one of the pushers (or something like that) temporarily re-purposes one of the hands for the date and day/night indication.
After developing the chronograph movement Quinting has placed it in a large range of models. The 43mm wide watch comes in steel or various types of gold with many different style and decoration options. There are also a lot of diamond and precious stone options as well for the bezel and case. One additional decorative thing Quinting sometimes does is place an image inside of the dial (as you can see one of the watches here has a done in the dial).
As far as niche watches go, these are for very special collectors. I must say that having experienced Quinting watches hands-on, they are cool and well made – but also pricey given the lust most people have for mechanical watches, and given what quartz watches tend to go for. However, while these are quartz based movements, they are totally unique and no one else uses this patented technology. It is also one of the things that you can only do with electronic watches, which helps justify the use of the technology. You can see a few of these Quinting Chronograph Mysterious Quinting watches available at James List here.