zOwie Omega Discussion Forum

I bought my Omega partly because of the good stuff I read about it on this forum, so I thought it only fair that I should feed my bad experience back for the benefit of anyone else who's thinking of buying one.

I bought a Bond-style SMP chronometer back in May. A week or two after purchase, I noticed that it was running slow and I contacted Omega who told me to measure the deviation over 15 days and then return the watch to the place of purchase, so they could calibrate it. After 15 days, it turned out the watch was running almost seven seconds slow, per day - i.e. outside the chronometer specifications.

The day before I was planning to drop it back into the shop, I was walking through my front door, and knocked the watch against the door handle, which chipped the edge of the sapphire crystal and shattered part of it inside, so that the space between the inside of the crystal and the face ended up with lots of crystal chips in it.

Needless to say, I was not impressed. I brought the watch back to the shop and they sent it away to Omega. After hearing nothing for three weeks, I went in today and the shop assistant phoned up Omega, to be told that, as far as they were concerned, the damage was "accidental damage", rather than a manufacturing defect with the watch itself, and that I would have to pay to have the watch fixed. They hadn't yet finished assessing the watch and couldn't yet tell me how much it was going to cost.

They claimed that their assessment of the watch indicated that I had scraped the watch against something prior to banging it, and that this had chipped the crystal, weakening it, and that the subsequent bang against the door shattered the part of the crystal which had been weakened. They claimed that a dent on the bezel was consistent with this story.

This, as far as I'm concerned, is bull. I would have noticed if the sapphire was chipped. And, in any case, if the sapphire crystal is so weak that it can be chipped by scraping the watch against something, then they shouldn't have designed the watch in such a way that the crystal stands proud above the bezel.

I went for an Omega because I wanted a well-built watch that could stand up to the sort of punishment that a watch gets subjected to when, for example, being used whilst diving. Turns out that the fabled Omega Seamaster Professional can't even withstand normal daily wear. The cheap £30 quartz Sekonda that I was wearing previously (and am wearing again now) is more resilient than a £1050 Omega.

It looks like buying Omega will turn out to be a very expensive mistake for me.

Jack