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1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Mostly great watch Jun 10, 2009
This watch is great! Its light, its easy to set up and it gets lots of second looks. The downside is the magnified date lense; it extends past the watch crystal and sometimes gets caught on stuff as it moves. The conern is that it might crack sometime. Other than that it is strongly encouraged for anyone who wants to combine a work and dive watch.
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
 4 years and still going strong.... Nov 26, 2008
I bought this watch for my husband - a dive shop owner and instructor - in 2004 to replace his previous Citizen Aqualand (which he had for 5 years before that!)
The watch performs beautifully even after years of 2-tank salt water diving, teaching sessions in pools etc. He has never had any problems with his watch whatsoever, and it still looks great, whether he's wearing it in the water, or to a meeting.
If he ever had a problem with the one he's got, he assures me that the next thing he'll do is go right back out and buy another...
Problems with the watch as reported are probably due to improper sizing, or not ensuring the knob is screwed in properly before entering the water...
Worth every penny!
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
 Great watch, until you actually take it out for a dive Nov 23, 2008
I owned this watch for 11 months before I took it out for a first dive. Before that I really liked it. It is light enough, robust, kind of looks classy, and I really like the ecodrive.
First dive I took it out on it performed very well. We were under for 55 minutes at max depth of 55 feet/18 meters. The watch read great, even during the safety stop at 15 feet it was responsive and read well. After the dive it remembered max depth for record keeping purposes, which I really liked.
About two hours after the dive, the trouble started. When rinsing it with fresh water, I noticed condensation on the inside. Within a day I realized it was dying a slow death. The moisture on the inside must have killed the eco-drive and maybe drained its battery. The power drained, the watch slowed down, and after 5 days, it was all over.
I am very disappointed, because this is not a cheap watch, and I could also have bought a $200 SUUNTO computer that would not have given me this trouble.
The next step is to test Citizen's warranty, and see if they fix it for free, and then if it will work as a true dive watch. I am not getting my hopes up.
Update June 13 2009: Citizen repaired the watch without charge under warranty. I have a dive trip coming up in July and will test again then.
Update July 30 2009: took the watch out for 4 dives, deepest was 70 feet. It performed very well and I enjoyed to dive with it very much. In addition, I took it out snorkeling and skin diving to maximum 30 feet and it responded very well. With the watch repaired for free under comprehensive warranty, I raise it to 4 out of 5 stars.
7 of 7 found the following review helpful:
It's a good sturdy watch, but might not impress watch snobs. Aug 13, 2008
I'm a diver, and my wife wanted to buy me a watch to replace my cheapo watch. I wanted a big geeky dive watch, my wife wanted a nice watch that would look good with a suit. We both liked this watch.
In the past, I've never had a watch last more than a year. I'd buy watches that claimed to be waterproof to 300 meters, and the first time I'd dive with them would usually be the last. Sometimes it would only take a swimming pool to kill them.
All that changed when I got this watch. I've had it for almost 4 years now, and it just keeps going.
I dive with a dive team. We dive at least once per month. I've dove in water from 34 degrees up to 82 degress, and depths to at least 75 ft. In the last 4 years, this watch has gone with me on every dive. I remember one cold water dive where my dive computer's lcd screen went blank from the extreme cold. My Citizen watch kept going without a hiccup.
Our team does swiftwater rescues also. This training involves swiming down whitewater rapids and bouncing our bodies off rocks for fun. This watch stands up to that abuse too.
I can't imagine anyone questioning it's waterproffness. It's an AQUALAND! They are DIVE WATCHES! Not fancy watches that are supposed to look like dive watches.
If you want a fancy watch that does everything, this may not be the watch for you. But if you want a watch to tell the time, the depth, how long you've been in the water, what the max depth of your last dive was and the date, this watch fills the bill and looks good on your wrist doing it.
Pluses:
The glow-in-the-dark spots make it easy to read the time in low light.
The titanium is hypo-alergenic. Most stainless watches make me break out. This one doesn't
It's lighter than it looks (it's the titanium)
There's a section of the watch band that slides out to accomodate a diver with a wetsuit. Neat idea.
Two hours of light (doesn't even have to be sunlight) runs the watch for a month.
The band is comfortable, and stiff enough that it stays put. It doesn't rotate around your wrist like some of the other watches I've owned.
The only minus I'd mention is that the face is a little busy, which can make reading the time a challenge at certain times. I've gotten used to it.
If the link pin on your band fell out, somebody screwed up when they sized it. There are little rings inside the links that capture the pin. If you aren't carefull (or don't know about them) they can easily fall out when you have the pin out. Once they fall out, the pin won't stay in the link and will work itself loose. Have a jeweler size the watch for you. If the pins fall out, find another jeweler that knows what they are doing.
8 of 13 found the following review helpful:
 Great concept, flawed execution Jan 24, 2008
I bought a cheap $150 Citizen eco-drive wristwatch a year ago when my first Tag Heuer's strap broke and I was awaiting replacement parts. Not expecting very much, I was actually really impressed. So fast-forward a year and for my birthday I receive a really great present: the Citizen men's Acqualand titanium watch. Conceptually it's perfect for me: a robust diver's watch that never needs a battery and that's light and easy to wear. I especially like the inner-dial concept: instead of the manic chrono functions found on watches like the Breitling Chrono Cockpit and the Tag Aquaracer, with the Citizen you get a second hand (60 seconds around the mini-dial) and a 24-hour hand (quite helpful when you regularly cross as many time-zones as I do, and always think in terms of 24-hour time). So far so good...
But sadly the execution lets the watch down. The manual is classic old-fashioned Japanese tech-translation gibberish, though sadly without the unintentional humor of yester-year's efforts. It's pretty much impossible to get the watch to function as described in the manual, and I've read on blogs that the water resistance is highly suspect. So there goes the idea of using this as a dive watch - after all, who wants to have to send the thing in for repairs after every dive?
So all in all I'm still really happy to have received this as a birthday gift and it will definitely be a watch I wear when out skiing and when on business trips. The luminescence is fantastic and makes telling the time in almost any lighting conditions very easy. But I'll stick to my Tags for the heavy lifting and I confess I'm saving my pennies for the gold-and-blue Breitling Chrono cited above because it's just so damned in-your-face appealing and, according to friends who own them, Breitlings are as rock-solid as Tag Heuers (I own a gold 6000 series I know it will still be serving me well 20 years from now). But for less than 8% of the cost of a Breitling and less than 25% of a Tag, the Citizen is a really good watch that is sadly let down by the details. UPDATE: one month into my ownership of this watch, the titanium strap fell apart because one of the link retaining pins just slid out. Of course I can get it repaired under warranty, but I like to think my watches will spend more time on my wrist than in a FedEx envelope on their way to & from the repair facility... So really I can't recommend this company's products and I'd reduce the star rating except Amazon's site doesn't let you do that when you edit or update reviews. Anyhow, not an impressive experience all round, which is sad because the concept of the watch is very interesting.
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