What is the purpose of a watch? Most fundamentally it is to keep the time, and to tell the time; to state as much is an objective statement of fact (otherwise I don’t know what we’re all doing). We can keep time in a few different ways, but quartz watchmaking, like the Citizen Caliber 0100, far surpasses everything else in terms of precision and accuracy. Similarly, we commonly tell time with hands indicating the hour, minutes and seconds rotating round a graduated dial, to which the digital display is the modern, ubiquitous alternative.

But if a watch is defined by its purpose, and that purpose primarily is to keep the time, then there is simply no watch in the world now, and there never has been, better than the Citizen Caliber 0100. Calling it the most accurate wristwatch ever made to not reference an external time signal is to make an objective statement of fact. However, to claim it is therefore one of the best watches to have ever been made is sadly an arguable statement of opinion, which is why I will proceed to spill words to belabor the point.

What determines whether a watch is the best ever made? Materials? Craftsmanship? Technical ingenuity? Design? Complications? Heritage? Something else? I would posit each of these is ultimately extraneous to whether a watch fulfills its primary purpose, and yet we live in a world that values all those attributes. Philippe Dufour wears a Rolex or a Lange, presumably the former for its reliability and robustness, and the latter for its beauty, attention to detail, and craftsmanship, while he himself is widely considered the greatest living watchmaker today, and his watches are unobtainium of the highest order in terms of price and availability. I long to own a Credor Eichi II, one of the finest Japanese watches ever made. In America, buyers are spoiled for choice with JN Shapiro offering groundbreaking guilloche dials, and RGM offering serial production in-house tourbillons. Roger Smith carries forward and redefines the legacy of fine British watchmaking. The Swiss…have Swiss Made.

These are some examples that commonly come up when the best watches in the world are discussed, and you know what else they have in common? None of them is available for less than a five-figure amount, and yet none of them could beat a high accuracy quartz movement of the Citizen Caliber 0100 or offerings from several other brands when it comes to their primary purpose of keeping the time.

But you know what beats everything, and for a smaller than five-figure price tag?

If you haven’t figured out by now, this is not a watch review assessing the specs, or the beauty of the case shape, or a description of how it sits on the wrist. I mean, sure, the Citizen Caliber 0100 is a well-executed, comfortable to wear wristwatch in a titanium case with a rather pointless display case back, a titanium bracelet, and a handsome overall design. The dial furniture is pretty good too, all of it, and the hour hand can be set independently. If I could have afforded it at the time, I would have sprung for the white gold limited edition in 100 pieces that cost three times as much as the one in titanium I eventually bought.

The clincher for me is that in about six months of time syncing, or 15,842,047 seconds to be precise, my watch has not lost a single second. I synced it to time.gov, noted down the time and a description of the visually perceptible delta between the ticking of the reference time signal from the atomic clock that loses a second in 300 million years, and my watch. I set a reminder to check back in six months. And my giddiness over the observation of the visually perceptible delta between the two ticking second hands remaining unchanged for that duration is what motivated me to spill out this many words about it.

If you’re looking to own one of the best watches in the world, and at a price point significantly cheaper than other “best watch” contenders, l recommend the Citizen Caliber 0100.