cazalea[Seiko Moderator]
19597
Seiko's specs are wildly outside of the normal performance
If you look around on the web you will see the 4R36 does much better than the Specs Seiko publishes -- actually I saw +45/-30 as specs but people claiming +/- 3 or 5 seconds.
Maybe 6-12 seconds a day is reasonably good performance that many people report.
The issue is that they are not individually regulated. At the wholesale price of say $150 how could Seiko afford to spend time on each movement tweaking it?
So after a few months or years of wearing, if its accuracy is less than you can tolerate, a quick visit to the local watch shop can easily improve it.
Granted this is not taking the "high road" but it's a commodity product sold to millions of people and likely not worn everyday anyway, so extreme accuracy is relatively unimportant vs style and toughness.
Your Mileage May Vary (as they say) but mine have been much more accurate than the specs.
Cheers
Cazalea