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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday July 24 2019, @03:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the is-it-impact-resistant? dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Torturing An Instrumented Dive Watch, For Science

The Internet is a wild and wooly place where people can spout off about anything with impunity. If you sound like you know what you’re talking about and throw around a few bits of the appropriate jargon, chances are good that somebody out there will believe whatever you’re selling.

Case in point: those that purport that watches rated for 300-meter dives will leak if you wiggle them around too much in the shower. Seems preposterous, but rather than just dismiss the claim, [Kristopher Marciniak] chose to disprove it with a tiny wireless pressure sensor stuffed into a dive watch case.

[...] The first interesting result is how exquisitely sensitive the sensor is, and how much a small change in temperature can affect the pressure inside the case. The watch took a simulated dive to 70 meters in a pressure vessel, which only increased the internal pressure marginally, and took a skin-flaying shower with a 2300-PSI (16 MPa) pressure washer, also with minimal impact. The video below shows the results, but the take-home message is that a dive watch that leaks in the shower isn’t much of a dive watch.


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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday July 24 2019, @06:56PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Wednesday July 24 2019, @06:56PM (#870810) Journal

    Thanks so much for all this detailed info.

    On a sort of related topic, I do think that such a test posted online might be useful for some people. We live in an age of increasing doubt. (And in many cases consumers often have very good reasons to doubt manufacturers' claims.)

    I agree with your assessment here, but the sort of misinformation about watches spreads quickly on the internet -- "You can't even shower with them on!" And sometimes citing specs isn't enough to convince anyone, but seeing a video is. Weird, but most people don't really have a scientific mindset. You can cite numbers and statistics, but they see a video of a guy testing it, and suddenly they believe it. (Sometimes.) Of course, an online video could be doctored. Websites have sponsors all the time who do "generous" reviews. I'm NOT saying that happened here, but people also have a valid reason to question such things too.

    And I'm sure some of those folks are arguing somewhere on the internet right now -- "Obviously, this guy is a paid shill!" Or, "obviously this is what they want you to believe, but you see how he did this in the video? That's fishy..." Etc. We live in an era of both doubt and conspiracy theory. I don't know how to change that in general. But to the question at hand -- some people will believe this online "experiment" more than they believe specs. Others will still shout about conspiracies. 'Tis the way of the world these days it seems.

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