Do you have a favourite brand?

[geoffbot]

Is the question only interested in companies as they are in their current state?

Both?

[gnuyork]

Omega.

[Der Amf]

Both?

In that case my favourite company in a specified era is Seiko in the Sixties (or more like, from late fifties until the mid seventies).

The phenomenal drive to produce excellent mechanical movements trickled all the way through the company. The movements they produced at all levels were excellent, of thorough-going robust quality. The designs for the watches showed good variety within fairly conservative boundaries.

I just find it fascinating, and look forward to buying more and more of them

Now, if Domo would kindly rewrite that paragraph with a lot more learning, that would be great

[Fantasio]

Several brands that I like, but I have a soft spot for Nomos. It was the first luxury watch I bought and I like their approach to manufacturing and marketing. Being independent in this business is also a plus in my records.


Sent from Maxwell Smart's shoe.

[Matt]

Another one for Omega.

When I first started collecting watches, you could realistically pick up a decent second hand vintage Omega for twenty quid on ebay. The company had really got to grips with the fightback from near extinction, but it really hadn't had much of an effect on the vintage segment. Sure there were specific models that had a cult following for one reason or another but the handwind, quartz, pocket watch and tuning fork stuff was very poorly understood. As a reasonably poor student with occasional dollops of money from writing papers or from indexing books, watches were a perfect back boiler hobby. I just wish I'd pursued them with the sort of focus that came with forum membership later.

Whisper it quietly, but even the very finest brands just were just not that far off Omega until the early seventies when they really started to pull ahead. So a good vintage Omega is about as good a watch as you can get and you could (and really still can) get them for peanuts. They were a company who took pride in their watches and didn't cut corners. There's a terrible period from the mid seventies to the mid nineties, but they've really picked themselves up and have managed to use the foundation of their huge back catalog of handsome, wearable designs and design cues to get a very long way in the process of levering themselves back up into the position of being the finest and most innovative truly mass market manufacture bar none.

The bottom line is that Omega have a wealth of really nice movement designs and an even wider range of lovely case designs. They are generally fairly easy to work on and, as one of the largest watch manufactures spares are reasonably obtainable, one way or another.

Other brands I really like are Smiths, Certina, JLC and Seiko's quartz models.

[Teeritz]

Add me to the Omega men. When I sold watches, I had numerous customers who would tell of how their fathers came to Australia back in the '50s and '60s and would buy themselves an Omega watch once they settled in and gotten jobs here. We're not talking stockbrokers and lawyers, but cleaners and factory workers. In my mind, I always viewed Omega as a reasonably affordable brand of very good quality. When I began waitering in the late 1970s, I scrabbled together my $150 and bought a quartz Seamaster that served me very well until I got a TAG Heuer dive watch in the mid Eighties.
I've bought a few vintage Omega pieces in the last fifteen years and have always been impressed with their designs and timekeeping. Although the company's focus has definitely shifted in the last six or seven years, putting their prices into Rolex territory, I will always remember the customers I served who told me about the Omega watches their Dads wore.

[londonflash]

Omega as well.

Honourable mention to Tudor.

[iyonk]

CASIO and SEIKO...

to bad i'm not rich..

[93EXCivic]

Vostok in particular the Amphibian.

I love the history behind them (both in terms of interesting design solutions and being used by the Russian military and cosmonauts), the domed acrylic crystal, the ruggedness of them, the 10 year interval between services, the 200M WR and the smoothness of the handwinding.

I will admit they have some quirks that not everyone will love ie the wobbly crown, the no quick date set, the weak lume and bidirectional bezel. Personally I like the bidirection bezel. The wobbly crown doesn't bother me at all.

I have had four (still have two) and will probably be adding three more this year (the NVCH-30 reissue, a dateless Gagarin dial and a 710 series "Rally driver").

[Little Big Feather]

No. I pride myself on having no bias and own a wide variety of brands

..What he says.......but,with a straight face...