I have never heard the workhorse Sellita 200-1 described as a crown jewel. Literally never.
I suppose it might take that title compared to the Chinese tat in most of their watches, or the very bottom of the range Miyotas that also feature a lot with their shonky second hand jumping, but it is, was, and always will be, a clone of the ETA 2824 with one added jewel of dubious functional merit. It’s a good, strong, easy to service movement that can be regulated to high accuracy. And as such it’s the ‘go to’ movement for Swiss makers in the lower-middle range (Raymond Weil, Oris etc.). There’s nothing wrong with it (other than a tendency to break when hand-winding - the spinning rotor - that it shares with the ETA 2824 and hasn’t really been fixed).
If they were honest, they could say ‘this is a sturdy and accurate movement, created to last a long time and to be easy for any watchmaker to work on. It’s used in many good Swiss watches.’ And that would be truthful, not misleading, and would still show it as a good product.
What I really hate is all the exaggeration. If they exaggerate THAT much ‘crown jewel’ then it’s simply lying. And we know that selly telly presenters are the most ethical. After all, they are our friends.
Fiends.
Friends.
Yeah, but it’s obvious there are three reasons to why he’s doing it, one the bulk of the audience/potential customers are horologically challenged so they won’t know how much bullshit he’s talking, secondly his horological knowledge isn’t much better which leads to him spouting bullshit and thirdly exaggeration is to wow the potential horologically challenged customer into buying the alleged super, super watch with an incredible "jewel in the crown" movement.
The evidence for the above is quite easy to figure out, reason one is explained by the amount and variety of crap watches IW customers are buying which is obviously evidence they haven’t a clue about watches. Two is explained by the utter crap we hear being spouted by Reynolds, whether that is about hybrid movements, COSC certification, T100 GTLS tubes etc etc. And the third is visual evidence of watching them con folks on show after show.
Last night show was full of mistakes/misinformation/exaggeration etc, too many to mention, starting off with the amazing brand new limited edition Oceanum Liberandum Watch, which in reality is just like the Gurkha watch, which itself is the earlier Space Race watch with a different coloured dial/engraved back and given a new name and a new story, right through to him mentioning the Ronda Swiss made movement that was jeweled, he emphasised that the fact that it was jeweled was very, very important and was how you could tell is was a "Swiss Made" movement and not one from the Far East (ie Ronda, Hong Kong), sounds good, but he just happened to be speaking about one of the few Ronda movements where both versions have the same exact specs, both the Swiss and Far East versions ARE jeweled, both versions have ONE jewel.
In between we had him spouting about the Seiko (Seiko Epson) perpetual calendar movement YM86, which was so great and amazing that instead of only being £699 the VE watch should have been over a thousand pounds, the movement was special, oh so special, which is strange as I’ve the same movement (although Seiko branded 7T86 rather than Seiko Epson) in a Seiko SPC129P1 watch and it only cost £159.
And of course the SW 200, which he should really be calling SW200-1, which is the upgraded version of the SW200 “crown jewel” movement, allegedly fixing the ratchet wheel problem.
