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A buyers' guide to digital watches

Broadcast Date: Dec. 16, 1979

There's something new on Christmas wish lists this year: a digital watch. In place of clockwork that requires daily winding, the newest technology in wristwatches uses a battery-powered quartz crystal and a small computer chip to create a digital readout. The watches display the day, hour, minute and second, and a pricier model even features an alarm. But it's not what's inside the watch that determines its price, as the CBC's Marketplace learns.

A buyers' guide to digital watches

• Digital watches first came on the market in the mid-1970s. In July 1975 the business pages of the Globe and Mail reported that because of their intricate circuitry, most "electronic" watches were being manufactured by calculator companies.
• Sales of digital watches in 1974 were estimated at between 650,000 and 770,000. An industry analyst predicted that by 1980, sales of digital watches would reach 30 million to 50 million.

• The price of a digital watch in 1975 averaged $85, down from $160 the year before. That works out to about $311 and $648, respectively, in 2005 dollars.
• In 1976, the Globe and Mail's consumer reporter, Ellen Roseman, wrote about digital watches. In an article headlined "A watch for people who can't tell time," she explained that the new watches "show the time in numbers like those on the bottom of a bank cheque."

• A quartz crystal is key to the digital watch's function. With voltage from a battery, it vibrates 32,768 times per second to keep time and in turn is connected to an integrated circuit that drives the display on the watch.
• Conventional wind-up watches, on the other hand, use a balance wheel to keep time. They are less accurate than digital watches and must be manually wound to keep ticking.

• There were two types of display available in early digital watches:
• LED (light-emitting diodes) watches required wearers to press a small button to view the time. Users found LED watches "annoying," and the battery also wore out more quickly.
• LCD (liquid crystal display), which uses existing light to reflect its numbers, is constantly visible but dimmer than LED. Today's digital watches use LCD technology.

• The digital watch grew in popularity through the late '70s. In December 1980, consumer reporter Ellen Roseman wrote that its charm had waned: "Consumers seem to have rebelled against gadgets that tell the time as 3:58 or 12:02."
• As the price of digital watches plunged, they came to be seen as cheap, throwaway devices. Watches with a dial, however, were viewed as something more akin to jewelry.

• By the mid-1980s, sales of digital watches showed buyers were abandoning them. The most popular watches, exemplified by the Swatch brand (introduced in 1983), featured a traditional analog face but were powered by a quartz crystal.
• Today's digital wristwatches are largely limited to the sports niche. Of the 250 models marketed by Timex in 1996, only 15 per cent were digital.
• About 40 per cent of today's bedside alarm clocks feature digital displays.

Also on December 16:
• 1900: The first North American credit union is founded in Levis, Quebec by Alphonse Desjardins.
• 1901: Dawson City, Yukon is incorporated.
• 1986: The New Democratic Party gets its first Member of Parliament from Quebec when Robert Toupin, Independent, joins their ranks.

A buyers' guide to digital watches

Medium: Television

Program: Marketplace

Broadcast Date: Dec. 16, 1979

Guest(s): Joseph Goncalves

Host: Bill Paul, Joan Watson

Duration: 3:57

Last updated:
Dec. 13, 2005