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2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 Solid Watch Jan 21, 2012
By Jeffrey A. Waibel
I recently purchased this watch and I have found it to be a solid watch. I will be reviewing design, build, time keeping, features, and conclude with an overview.
Design:
The design of this watch moves away from the classic Calibre 2100. The dial is still circular, but the case is now in a sort of quasi-rectangle. If you were a fan of the AV0031 then you probably don't like this change. For my taste, I think it gives the watch an overall feel of being larger and more substantial. The one downfall is that there is now a somewhat awkward transition between the band and the case. My guess is that Citizen wanted to keep the band close to the width of the old band (so that the watch doesn't get an oversized feel). The band itself is a different design than the AV0031 and I think it is an improvement. The links appear bigger and perhaps even more solid. This watch (54A) comes with a white face, but there is a sister watch (54H) that has a grey face. The drawback to a white dial is that you can't see the minute and hour hands quite as clearly as you can against the grey dial. The drawback to the grey face, however, is that the subdials do not have as much contrast. I think this decision comes down to personal taste. I prefer the white face because I think it gives the whole watch a more unified and elegant look. The white hour and minute hands are outlined in silver so I don't have any trouble seeing them. Make no mistake: this watch is huge. It is heavy and it has a 45mm case diameter. This is a big watch and it would probably look a little awkward on a slender wrist. I prefer a watch to be heavy, however, because I like my watches to have substantial wrist presence. I want to know the watch is there.
Build:
The build quality of this watch is excellent, much like its predecessor. It is solidly built with large buttons for the chronograph and a large screw-down crown. The chronograph buttons seem very hard to push, by my standards. The band is also very sturdy and is a marked improvement over other citizen stainless steel bands. For example, the band of the BL5400 (another large, white dial chronograph) feels somewhat light and insubstantial. This band, however, is solid, heavy, and strong. The fold-over clasp seems to also be very strong and it has the safety clasp (sometimes called a sports clasp) as well. I personally like this feature because it gives double assurance this very heavy watch won't come flying off your wrist in the middle of a gesture. Perhaps the most notable change in the build of this watch is the sapphire crystal. Unlike mineral crystal on the 2100's predecessor, this crystal is very hard and mostly scratch resistant. Aesthetically one can't really tell the difference, but it adds to the overall durability of the watch.
Time Keeping:
The primary function of a watch is to keep time, yet I have owned watches that lose time over the course of weeks or sometimes even days. This watch has a Japanese quartz movement and is very accurate. I did a simple test by setting the watch to match an atomic clock and it kept time extremely well. The second hand is built into a sub-dial on the watch face and it appears to be very precise (albeit somewhat small).
Key Features:
One thing to understand about this watch is that the key feature is time keeping. This is not a pilot's watch, a dive watch, a mariner's watch, or any other such thing. It is a watch. The key feature is keeping time and doing it very well and in an elegant case. It also has a 12-hour chronograph built in with a sweeping second hand (in 1/5 increments) built into the main dial and the minute hand and hour hand built into sub-dials. The Chronograph resets by instantly shooting back to the 12. As was mentioned previously, the chronograph buttons are inordinately hard to push in my estimation. This makes it very difficult to do quick button pushes if you were timing something where you needed a high level of accuracy. The watch also has an alarm feature. The alarm is set with a separate crown and it is turned on and off by pushing the alarm crown in. This is a huge improvement on how to set the alarm compared to other Citizen watches. It is simple and effective. The alarm itself is not very loud and I am not convinced it would actually wake me up in the morning. The final key feature of this watch is the eco-drive. This technology is nothing short of amazing as it keeps the watch charged by light from the sun or another artificial light source. One very nice feature of the 2100 is a built in sub-dial that shows you how much charge the eco-drive battery is at any given time. New to the AV0050 are the LVL1, LVL2, and LV3 indicators on this sub-dial. I personally think these indicators are completely useless. You can tell just by looking at the dial what level charge the watch has. This watch does not have the perpetual calendar which is a bit of a double-edged sword. On one hand that functionality would be nice on a watch as expensive as this (expensive for a Citizen I mean). Citizen has built this function into much cheaper watches. On the other hand, however, not having the perpetual calendar makes the watch easier to set. Citizen is notorious for making watches that are overly complicated to set the time and date. On this watch, however, that is simplified by the loss of the perpetual calendar. I personally like having a watch that is easier to set (I have read reviews of other Citizen watches where the reviewer hated the watch simply based on how difficult it was to set the time and calendar).
Overview:
This is a well-built, beautiful, and precise watch. There are minor problems such as a chronograph button that is hard to push, but they don't really detract from the overall effect of the watch. It is a very large watch and it is very heavy. Some people don't like watches to be this heavy and for them I would suggest the AV0021. The watch has a sapphire crystal, alarm, chronograph, and eco-drive technology. I whole-heartedly recommend this watch as a worthy successor to the AV0031.
4 of 5 found the following review helpful:
Beautiful Watch! Oct 25, 2011
By J. DERYCKERE
I just got this watch at Macys a couple weeks ago and absolutely love it, the build quality is amazing, extremely solid and feels heavy duty, they even offered a protection plan that I probably would have gotten on most watches but I told them no thank you as I believe this watch can definitely take a beating. Now I had a very strict criteria in what kind of watch I wanted. Solid build quality, can wear with anything, chronograph, sapphire crystal, good water resistance, big without looking gaudy, and most important no battery replacements. I usually only buy Swiss made (quartz or automatic) watches because of the quality of materials used to make the watches but this watch has opened my eyes to Citizen and their quality. One thing that always made me dislike most Japanese watch companies (bulova, citizen, Seiko etc.) is basically all there best looking/popular watches in the 400-600 range use mineral crystal usually have hollow squeaky bands, which is garbage in my opinion. But this one is very heavy and solid and contains a sapphire crystal, is solar powered, gmt functionality, has a chronograph,alarm, power reserve indicator, looks good from suit to jeans, and to top it all off, it has 200M water resistance. Honestly I dont think there is anything this watch can't do. The pictures online dont really do it justice you have to see in person to really appreciate it, because if I just saw the picture online I probably wouldn't even consider it. This, in my opinion, is one of the best Citizen Watches you can buy, and I literally looked about 50 of them at all different price points. Will do a follow up review in about a year so let you know of its durability.
1 of 3 found the following review helpful:
 Wow! What happened Citizen?! Oct 24, 2011
By Olaf Johnson
When my fiance offered to get me an engagement item I mentioned the "original" Calibre 2100 watch. Funny thing was the hotel we stayed in during our engagement weekend at Mohegan Sun, CT had an official Citizen Dealership in the lobby. This was July 4th weekend and they told us they no longer carried the "original" 2100 and had the new version on sale. I was excited to test the waters and jumped right in the pool.
That weekend I spent some time wearing this "facelift" version to the original Calibre 2100 that I always wanted. I also own a steel Citizen Nighthawk and a gold/brown-leather-band Citizen Minute Repeater Calibre 9000. So I'm no newbie to their amazing watches.
Compared to the original 2100 this new version immediately looks cheaper when you put it on. The design is not original at all. It looks like it belongs on a Walgreens watch display carousel next to the reading glasses.
The bracelet, the crown and the push buttons all felt loose and cheap. The semi-square bezel and monster size lugs seems to suggest that the watch can't make up it's mind on whether to be classic or modern.
The fit on my wrist compared to other watches was difficult and most guys that have medium sized or smaller wrists like me will find a hard time fitting this watch to wear comfortably. The issue for me is the shape of the face and bezel being long and wide relative to the band so there is this feeling of imbalance between the hefty 44mm case width (approximately 1 3/4") and super thin bracelet.
That said, feature wise the watch didn't impress me when compared to what the original 2100 offers. The only issue the original 2100 had was the mineral glass would scratch easily. On this new 2100 a scratch proof sapphire crystal glass is used. This is basically the only improvement over the original model.
However, those that are considering buying the original version over this new version should rest assured that Citizen will replace the mineral glass on the original version 2100 watched with the sapphire glass for a fee of $100+ and a turn around of 2 weeks.
So instead of paying the list price of $699.99 (or the actual retail of $500+) for this facelift 2100 watch it would be wise to get the original 2100 that still sells brand new on some online retail sites for as cheap as $259 and then paying $100+ extra to upgrade it to the sapphire crystal.
BOTTOM LINE: If you can get past the odd look and awkward fit then you may be happy with the features of this watch. For me Citizen has ruined a classic watch with unnecessary modern touches and no real upgrade to the features that the original had. Also it just felt uncomfortable on my medium wrist because of its design. I had to leave this monstrosity back in CT. Even as a gift I couldn't accept it for the price paid because I would never wear it. This watch gets only 1 star from me.
0 of 5 found the following review helpful:
 Disappointed Sep 27, 2011
By Lonestarcj7
I love everything about this watch EXCEPT...any month with less that 31 days and you have to manually change the date. What a disappointment! I would expect after paying a reasonable amount of money for a watch that it would keep up with the date. They were so close! I am sending it back. For those that don't mind the date thing, I think it would be a great watch.
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based on 4 reviews
