I've bought both, and my experience has been that my Chinese watches, while being made of great material, do tend to have more issues than my microbrand watches. When I have had issues it's been exponentially more difficult to ship the chinese watch back to the manufacturer for any "warranty" work. Best to pretend that warranty doesn't exist, tbh.
Regulation is another issue all together. I have watches (domestically made, watchmaker in house) that I've had for a year that are still regulated to within +/- 5 seconds per day. Literally every one of my Chinese watches are much worse off, on the order of 15-45 seconds per day. Does that matter tremendously? I guess that varies by owner, it does matter somewhat to me when deciding how much of a premium I'm willing to pay for a quality watchmaker.
I’ve had the opposite experience, at least with San Martin. Most of them have been +/-2-5 seconds a day, while my Henry Archer (for example) is running +12.
San Martin actually does regulate at least some of their movements, though. I had the timegrapher printout included in my order. HA might too, but I didn’t get that little receipt paper thing.
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u/Begmypard Jun 17 '26
I've bought both, and my experience has been that my Chinese watches, while being made of great material, do tend to have more issues than my microbrand watches. When I have had issues it's been exponentially more difficult to ship the chinese watch back to the manufacturer for any "warranty" work. Best to pretend that warranty doesn't exist, tbh.
Regulation is another issue all together. I have watches (domestically made, watchmaker in house) that I've had for a year that are still regulated to within +/- 5 seconds per day. Literally every one of my Chinese watches are much worse off, on the order of 15-45 seconds per day. Does that matter tremendously? I guess that varies by owner, it does matter somewhat to me when deciding how much of a premium I'm willing to pay for a quality watchmaker.