After taking the Citreon DS3 in search of delicious pies and proceeding to work them off at the gym, this week Steven Yuen gives us his take on the perfect watch. It's a subject that he admits he isn't familiar with, but that hasn't stopped him from adding his opinions to what is already a highly-debated topic. Read on to find out whether you agree with him.

The last two weeks I have written about pies and the gym, two subject areas I know a great deal about. This week I am going to dive into deep waters and try and blog about an area I have little knowledge about. Watches. First off, I want to say that I know little about watches and I have never even bought myself a watch or have been interested in watches until I entered the August Man competition. So you may find this blog a little amateurish, given that many of the August Man readers are avid watch experts.

Recently, a friend showed me his watch collection which was quite extraordinary. I think the value of all his watches could probably solve the Greek crisis. Hublot, Graham, Audemars Piguet… he certainly had an amazing collection. However, what I found interesting was that despite these impressive watches, all of them lacked two fundamental things that I find essential in a watch.

1. A decent power reserve

Out of his collection, most of his watches had a power reserve of approximately 48 hours! To me this is like buying a really nice looking car but finding out that it has a really bad engine.  I mean, most of these luxury watch companies pride themselves on having good movements etc, but amazingly they only last 2 days. Here are the power reserves of some watches:

• Omega Seamaster: 44 Hours
• Rolex Submariner: 47 Hours
• Tag Heuer Carrera: 50 Hours

When I was a child, I used to do a lot of swimming.  I would swim in a 50-metre pool and try and shave off valuable microseconds. The difference between a 27.5 second swim and a 27.0 second swim was huge. The 0.5 seconds was the difference between a good swim and a really bad swim. Unfortunately, if you have a clock that “ticks” in seconds you can’t really measure this. Hence what you need is a clock that “sweeps” in seconds so you can gage how fast you swam. Of course, digital is still the best option, but for some reason the swimming pools always seemed to have analogue clocks.

What I find annoying about most watches, even the luxury ones, is that most of them tick. Although they appear to be sweeping they are indeed ticking. For example, most luxury watches tick at 28,800 beats per hour (BPH), which works out to be 8 ticks per second. If you look very closely you will notice that the watch is actually ticking (although very fast since its 8 per second), and to the human eye it appears to sweep somewhat, but it doesn't really. The Omega Seamaster, Rolex Submariner and Tag Heuer Carrera all tick at 28,800 BPH. To a swimmer, this very fast ticking is just not acceptable! We demand perfection!

There are only 2 watches in the world that have a continuously sweeping second hand and this includes the Seiko Spring Drive and the Bulova Tuning Fork.

However, one thing you will notice is that the Spring Drive only has a power reserve of 72 hours, which is still 50 per cent better than most other watch brands but still a far cry from the 1-month power reserve of the Seiko Sportura. On the other hand, the Seiko Sportura second hand is not a continuously sweeping watch (although the middle chronograph dial is). Hence it would seem you can’t have both, and we will need to wait until technology improves. But at least in a Seiko you can get these two watch qualities which are found in very little luxury watches today.