Budget models with sapphire crystal glass?

[MasterG]

Hola!

I've yet to own a watch with sapphire crystal glass. Most of my watches to date have been mineral at best (or Corning Gorilla with Samsung Galaxy smartwatch) but I'm willing to get my first sapphire watch. Is the difference really so big in terms of endurance? I've stumble across this list: https://timepieceking.info/best-sapphire-crystal-watches-under-300/ and I'm surprised well-known brand such as Seiko offers sapphire so cheap. Is that the norm?

I won't lie, I've damaged some amount of watches in my life and probably should have got a watch with a more durable glass years ago.

Any feedback is highly appreciated and I'd like you to suggest some other brands too.

[spectre6000]

Plastic obviously scratches very very easily, and is meant to be replaced regularly. I don't think it's worth going into much more depth than this on the subject.

Mineral glass and treated variants is slightly better, but you can definitely still scratch the crap out of them. I wore a Seiko 5 for years, and put it through some serious paces. I am quite the automotive enthusiast, and I that watch spent many hours in many engine bays, behind grinders and welders, on the soft end of body hammers, you name it. By the time I got around to replacing it, the crystal was scratched all to hell, pocked from welding slag, and just not something for polite company. It took some effort to get it to show its wear, but it definitely showed it. You'd probably keep a watch looking fairly sharp if you replaced the crystal with each service, maybe every other if you're kind to it.

Sapphire crystals are a different animal. If your high school science cirriculum had any element of geology to it, you learned about relative hardness. A softer material always yields to a harder one, not the other way around. Sapphire is [i]almost[/i] as hard as it gets. Unless you work at an industrial site with lots of diamond tooling, you'll have a hard time finding anything that'll make a dent. Coatings are a different story; if you have an anti-reflective coating on the outside of the crystal, it will absolutely show wear pretty quickly. 

The watch I'm wearing as I type this has a sapphire crystal, and while it certainly doesn't see the sort of abuse the hardlex did on that Seiko, it's been bashed into the sharp corner of a particular granite countertop more than I care to admit. I took a small chip off said corner, and I scratched the hell out of the stainless bezel once, but the crystal still looks brand new. With hardness comes brittleness, and sapphire crystals can break, but I have not personally seen it happen.

If you look on Ali-X, you can find literally thousands of watches under $100 with sapphire crystals (at least that's what they claim). Some even have reputable Seiko and Miyota movements. You can even go a bit wild in the $130 range (if my memory is correct) and get a dive watch with a ceramic bezel to really test the utility of hardness in watch case materials. If you want to give it a shot without breaking the bank, that's a pretty inexpensive experiment for the genre.

Edited April 20, 2021 by spectre6000

[jdm]

4 hours ago, MasterG said:

 Is the difference really so big in terms of endurance? 

Yes it is. A generic flat sapphire cristal can cost just €10 retail, you can have one fit to pretty much any watch. 

[AshF]

This is the cheapest watch I own with a sapphire crystal.  Quite nice with a Seiko NH36A.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/33021815128.html

Can't fault it for £55!

[spectre6000]

Flagged.