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Julian Nice Tattoo wrote: »

Nice watch, I love it. Quartz is a risky investment your a braver man than me.

Then again FG ten years ago they were little enough money, now they're more like 2000 last time I looked, so like anything it depends when you buy. Then there's the tale of the chap over on TZUK who happened to snag on ebay one of those that was an actual tested and possibly flwon NASA example(where NASA replaced the bulb with a tritium light). Sweeeeet.

In the quartz pantheon generally speaking outside of early LED tech, digitals are usually the poor relation and analogue is what tends to sell and nearly always stuff from the earliest years of quartz. Much of it because being crazy expensive when new they had the best cases, dials, bracelets etc in the ranges and the latest styles. That segment really revved up in the last five years, with prices quadrupling and more. Though there has always been a small but loyal fanbase for digitals and prices have generally remained about the most stable of any watch sub genre.

Thirdfox's Speedy would be one of the outliers there with the upswing in values. I suppose the "Space Watch"(and Omega space watch) aspect really helped there. Ten years ago you could buy Seiko Pogue "space watch" for not much more than a hundred quid. I seem to recall getting one in '13 for under 200. Now not so much. I seem to recall Colonel Pogue's actual flown Seiko only got 5000 at auction. Today? I'd reckon triple that if it came up for sale again.

Biggest problem with quartz are spares, especially for oddball stuff. IMHO the collector pretty much needs a spare movement.

Julian Nice Tattoo wrote: »

I always worry that a quarts espically digitals, will just stop working and then its an electrical engineer you need not a watchmaker. A battery leaks or a capacitor explodes and its game over.

+1 FG In 90% of cases as you say it's game over. Most of the very earliest movements are fixable, but even there you need a real expert, and one who has spares.

In the mechanical scene a service can replace a lot of the movement without effecting value, a vintage quartz with a new movement or screen is heavily devalued.

Actually so long as it's the same movement or repaired with NOS parts rather than a modern replacement(99% wouldn't fit anyway) it doesn't seem to affect the values at all. Plus the older stuff unlike today was much more modular(and mechanical) so like mechanicals you can replace components. If you have them of course. Where serial numbers are present they're almost always on the main plate anyway. EG I have an example of Seiko's first calculator LCD and the LCD screen had faded as they tend to and I found a NOS screen on ebay, slapped it in and good as new. If anything it increased the value.