Making time go faster

For the luxury watch industry, accuracy is everything. With watches typically being sold for several thousand dollars, and in the case of the Patek Philippe Sky Moon Tourbillion 5002 P, $1.5 million, a time piece must be perfect and still accurate many years later.

This means that all components must be precision engineered and inspection systems put in place to ensure the luxury watches match their buyers' high expectations. Until recently, however, this has been a manual process, using a video microscope viewed by the manufacturer's team of experts to analyse the vital components.

With such watches containing over 500 individual mechanisms and components, and each component requiring multiple measurements taken, this is an exceptionally time and cost intensive process and only the most critical of components are therefore inspected.

Qualimatest has created an automated vision camera system. Called QMT WatchProjector it is already helping a number of major watch manufacturers to increase both the accuracy and speed of this process.

At the heart of the system is a Sony XCG5005 GigE camera. Because maximum resolution is essential this is set to 5 Megapixels and a telecentric lens is used. Once connected to a PC running Qualimatest's proprietary analysis software the system is able to accurately measure and analyse 20 times the number of components as a seasoned expert, and accuracy has increased too.

For further editorial information, please contact:
Rob Ashwell, Publitek
+44 (0) 1225 470000 / rob.ashwell [at] publitek.com / Skype: robpublitek / Twitter: @r_ashwell20

Spokesperson: Ivan Meissner | Directeur Général, Qualimatest