Sharing an excerpt from the article "The Fall and Rise of the Valjoux 7750" ,June 2008 Watch Time:
"There is much to admire about the 7750 and its offspring. These movements are famously precise and reliable. In fact, after they’ve been given careful fine tuning, the 7750 and its derivatives breeze through official chronometer tests.
Futhermore, the 7750 offer designers many options. They can choose to leave out the running seconds hand, the date display and/or the day indicator. The designer can dispense with the 12 hour counter or self-winding subassembly.
Critics so cite some drawbacks. Some watchmakers note the 7750’s relative thickness and large diameter, but these attributes are less problematic in this era of jumbo watches. And, in a watch with a transparent back, the 7750’s size is an asset. In addition, some wearers are conscious of the sound the rotor makes. It occurs because the large oscillating weight with its heavy metal segment can reach very high speeds when rotating in its non-winding direction. The sound is unavoidable, however, and shouldn’t be considered a defect.Others complain about the movement’s lack of exclusivity: about 200,000 units of the 7750 are made each year. Big as that number is, though, it isn’t enough to satisfy demand.
The shortage is likely to get worse this year because, in accord with its agreement with Swiss Competition Commission, ETA will start to reduce its deliveries of all its movement kits, including those for the 7750, in preparation for a total cutoff in 2010. ETA will continue to sell complete movements. About 75 percent of all mechanical movements in Switzerland are based on ETA movement kits, so this step will be a painful one for the firm’s customers.
Movement makers are developing substitutes for the 7750. The simplest is an exact replica. Since the patent for the 7750 has expired, nothing stands in the way of this project. Sellita is now hard at work on a clone of the 7750. It hasn’t been born yet, but it has been named; it will be called the SW 500. In the meantime, ingenious manufacturers in China are producing large numbers of rather coarse copies of the 7750 in various versions...."
personally for me, the wobble tells me that my PAMs are there. Sometimes I do kind of "miss" the wobble when I have the handwound PAMs on.
