The Rivalry Between Rolex and Omega

　　Introduction: Aside from football teams fighting for their country and personal honour, different watch brands are also full of rivalry. Today, let us take you throughRolexthe rivalry with Omega.

　　The Polarisation of the Electronic Timekeeping Era

　　No one can deny the severe blow that the quartz crisis dealt to the entire watch manufacturing industry. The aforementioned observatory trials were also announced to be suspended during the quartz crisis in 1968. Shortly afterwards, under pressure from the Japanese victory, the competition committee completely halted the observatory trials that had been held for a century. For the rival pair Rolex and Omega, they also chose different directions during the quartz crisis. There is a saying that goes: today's choices lead to having no other choice in the future. That may sound drastic, but it shows the importance of choices. Yet, looking back, Omega, which had won renown for its precision, must have had an extremely high level of participation in the research, development, and production of quartz projects, which similarly aimed for precision. The brand began developing electronic watches as early as 1964. In the joint effort by numerous major brands of the BETA group back then to develop quartz movements, both Rolex and Omega played indispensable driving roles. Representative works include the famous BETA21 movement, upon which Omega developed the f8192 movement, and it even spared no effort in its subsequent pursuit of greater precision to develop encapsulated resonators with a frequency of 2.359.296 hertz, namely the 2.4MHz movement, whereas its mechanical movements gradually waned.

　　In contrast,Rolex, despite participating in the development of quartz movements, did not mass-produce this movement which had not yet gained widespread certification at the time. The few quartz movements put into use underwent prolonged testing, while the research and production of mechanical movements were not abandoned. There were still quite a few outstanding mechanical movements born during the quartz era. Rolex's conservatism led it to choose a different path from its old rival Omega.

　　After the glory came the gloom; the eighties and nineties, following the quartz crisis, became a period of decline for Omega, which is truly lamentable. AndRolexquickly rose to prominence once again, holding an advantageous position.

　　The Battle of the Observatories

　　Rolexwas registered as a brand by Hans Wilsdorf in 1908. From its inception, the brand strode forward on the path of precision timekeeping. As early as 1910, Rolex watches became the first to be awarded a Swiss chronometer certificate by the Official Watch Rating Centre in Biel, Switzerland. Four years later, the Kew Observatory in the UK granted Rolex watches a Class A certificate—a grade at that time typically attained only by marine chronometers and subject to very stringent testing requirements. Since then, Rolex watches have become a symbol of precision timekeeping. In 1933, it became the Prince series, equipped with the Prince movement introduced a few years earlier. Featuring a larger balance wheel and mainspring barrel, with all movements adjusted in 6 positions and some even in 7 or 8 positions, it could arguably be considered one of the earliest series products with chronometer qualities. Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why the Prince series, which was re-released in 2005, possessed a chronometer movement; having been incorporated under the Cellini family, it even gave rise to the Cellini series' first-ever chronometer watch. Because the Prince watch has always walked the path of precision. Developing early on, Rolex went from strength to strength in the research and development of automatic movements. When all other institutions were still struggling with how to make winding simpler and more efficient, the brand had already developed the world's first 1931-degree automatic winding mechanism in 360 and filed multiple patents for it. Protected by patents, the automatic movement marched unhesitatingly towards precision chronometer standards. Looking across movement grade descriptions at the time, those marked with "or chronometer" were very few, and bubble-back watches equipped with such movements were, like the Prince watch, representatives of precision timekeeping.