The charge indicator gauge offers a few pieces of information based on what the user is doing. A sort of strength indicator is represented in the dynamic charge indicator gauge. Further still, you get to actually see how much power you just added to the battery with your winding. The “Direct Drive” name comes from the fact that winding the crown of the watch directly charges the battery. The Kinetic Direct drive solves this issue, and adds and interesting dimension of interactivity between watch and wearer. So if you didn’t wear the Kinetic movement watch often, it would not be very useful to you. This meant you had to wear the watch, or oscillate it in your hand for a charge. Unlike an automatic movement, you could not charge the watch by winding the crown manually.

First, other than the available charge indicator, and rotor to charge the battery, the watch did not have too many functional improvements. The Kinetic movement had some practical short comings however. At the time the Kinetic was released in the mid 1990s, it was quite an innovation. Via the push of a button you could see how much of a charge remained in the battery. The Kinetic movement was very successful for Seiko. This relieved the owner of ever having to replace the watch battery, and gave them the accuracy of a quartz movement. Take the rotor from an automatic mechanical movement, and instead of having it wind a main spring, have it charge a battery. Arguably the Spring Drive embodies this dream as it looks like an automatic mechanical movement, but has the accuracy of a quartz movement.īefore coming out with the Spring Drive movement, Seiko created the Kinetic movement. Seiko’s dream seems to be combining the best of both worlds in terms of quartz and mechanical movements. You can get a traditional quartz movement, an automatic mechanical movement, a quartz Kinetic movement, a quartz Kinetic Direct Drive movement, and a quartz regulated Spring Drive mechanical movement. In fact, Seiko watches now come in at least five different movement flavors. We are lucky that Seiko spends as much time as they do in the lab dreaming up new movements.

Seiko kinetic charge