CasioMen's W201-1AV Alarm Chronograph Watch

Very basic easy to operate watch. Does exactly what it’s supposed to do with the dual time and alarm the size is great for smaller wrist or for someone who wants a smaller watch. For the price value, you can’t beat it.

Casio still makes great, inexpensive digital watches in the low end of their range that work very well. I was initially looking at an F91 as a lightweight digital watch, but I think this watch is better constructed and has a lot of usable improvements over the F91.-- Build Quality and Case --The watch is extremely light and thin enough to fit under a shirt sleeve. The resin band will fit on small 6 inch wrists all the way up into the 8 inch range. The band does seem very soft and likely to break after significant wear though. It does use actual springbars instead of pins which means it should be easy to replace the strap if you want to. I tried to see if I could fit a thin nylon NATO strap on it, but there wasn't enough space.The watch is labeled as having a mineral crystal on Amazon, but I can't find any evidence of that anywhere else. If it scratches up like acrylic, I'll add a note to the review later.EDIT: It's definitely acrylic, but it won't scratch that easily. Mine has a few tiny little scratches that could probably be buffed out.The buttons are all plastic and slightly recessed, which makes setting times and alarms a bit inconvenient, but not difficult.-- Watch Features --The display is nice and clean with slightly larger digits (this watch is pretty easy to read). In the Alarm and Dual-Time modes, the date display will show the home time instead. The stopwatch works as expected, going all the way up to 24 hours(!), but you don't get to see the time simultaneously. You can just switch modes if you need to.The amber LED (which uses a lot less power than a blue EL backlight) illuminates the watch just fine and can be temporarily extended to stay on for 3 seconds.There's only one alarm, but it can't be set for a specific day or month like some G-Shocks. It's also kind of quiet. Treat it more as a reminder than something to wake you up. There's also the usual hourly chime. And for those who might be wondering, you can't mute the button press sounds.Sadly, there is no countdown timer.-- Conclusion --I'm really impressed with this watch. It makes a nice, lightweight beater watch for travel or work that you won't have to worry about for around 1/4 the price of an entry-level G-Shock. The build quality is pretty good given the extremely low price - Just be prepared that the band might fail on you after a year or two.

Very good for the price, but I probably should have paid a few more dollars and gotten a slightly better Casio model. This watch replaced a similar Casio digital watch I had for about three years and wore daily. It was cheaper to replace the watch than the watch band ($12), which was starting to tear. It's nice to have 10-year batteries, but I don't expect the band to last more than two or three years if you use the watch daily like I do. Pluses: very simple design (I don't want a lot of bells and whistles on my watch. I carry an iPhone for those.); very accurate time keeping; very inexpensive. Minuses: very disappointed when it got a fairly large scratch on its face the second day I wore it (I have to assume more scratches are only a matter of time); band is thinner than what I expected; can't figure out why I need horizontal bars that appear to count seconds (seems superfluous). I'd have given it another star if its face didn't scratch so easily.Update: Had this for at least two years. Still works fine and keeps excellent time. No more scratches since the second day I used it. For that reason, I'd give it an extra star; i.e. four instead of my original three stars.

I first became aware of Casio watches about 1980. I had noticed people wearing the black plastic watches and wondered: What is this? Can't these people afford a real watch? I always wore my Omega Seamaster and regarded it as one of the finer watches. Well, at just about that same time I started running and a friend who was guiding me in the sport suggested that I'd need a chronograph in order to time my runs. My Omega wouldn't do. I bought a Casio, which was just about the only brand available at that time. I wore it off and on for about a week, and my Omega Seamaster was from then on gathering dust in my dresser drawer. The Casio was just amazing, and it only cost about 25 1980 dollars. Well, I'm now on about my fifth Casio Chronograph, and I'm still amazed by it and this one cost only a little over 13 2012 dollars.These little Casios will wear out, as will anything. I find that for me they go in two places. One is the battery, and it can be replaced. This new one has a 10-year battery which is excellent. The other is the band will break, usually sometime after about five or six years. Well, the band can be replaced also. I have found, however, that the watch is so inexpensive that when it starts to break down, I just throw the watch away and buy a new one. That might seem a bit wasteful, but if you're averaging six years of use out of it, that's only about $2 a year and why diddle around with it?The Casio Chronograph is just an amazing piece of equipment. If it's a timepiece you want, well, you just can't get much better, and it's just dirt cheap. Amazing! Let the others wear their Omegas and their Rolexes. I'll proudly wear my Casio Chronograph and know they can't beat it. It's a form of reverse snobbery.Gary Peterson