Watch review: Citizen BL5250-02L “Brycen”

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I’ve decided to start reviewing my watch collection, just because I can (and also because I’ve been binging Nick Shabazz review videos and I wanted to give it a go, and this is my blog you can’t stop me). Feel free to ignore this and other reviews if it isn’t your thing.

Below is a review of my newest watch, Citizen’s BL5250-02L “Brycen”, using my time-untested system of The Good (for things that please me), The Beautiful (for places where the watchmaker went beyond the call of duty), The Nitpicks (for details that bug me but probably not anyone else), The Bad (for kinks that should’ve been ironed out) and The Shameful (for flaws that really have no reason to be there).

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— Specs —

List price: US $425
Display: Analog (hour, minute & second hands), 12-hour Arabic & index markers, 3 subdials (10-o’clock 24-hour dial, 2-o’clock function dial/chronograph 1/20 seconds, 6-o’clock mode dial), 4-o’clock date, tachymeter chapter ring
Crystal: Mineral
Dial color: Bluish black
Luminescence: Hour hand, minute hand, second hand (tail), mode subdial hand, hour markers, 12-o’clock bezel pearl
Case material: Titanium, silver, polished/brushed
Case size: 43 mm wide, 13 mm thick
Bezel material: Titanium, silver, polished
Bezel function: Unidirectional
Water resistance: 200 m
Calendar: Date (perpetual calendar)
Other features: Chronograph (1/20 sec., up to 60 mins.), daily alarm, dual time zone, low power warning
Movement: Quartz (light-powered)
Power reserve: 9 months
Accuracy: ~ +0.08 secs./day (specs: +/- 15 secs./month)
Band: Brown genuine crocodile leather, white stitching
Clasp: Pin buckle
Band/lug width: 22 mm
Year: 2006
Weight: 2.56 oz.

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The Good

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Front detail. Note the precise alignment of the hands with the second/minute markers, yet also the slight misalignment of the bezel pearl with the dial face.

• Functionality: The Brycen comes packed with a lot more features than you’d typically find on an analog watch. My favorite is the perpetual calendar, which ensures the date will always be accurate, regardless of the month or leap year, up until the year 2100. It has several modes, including a chronograph (good up to an hour and accurate to 1/20^th of a second), a secondary time zone (“local time”, for those who travel a lot and don’t want to adjust the hour all the time) and a daily alarm (albeit with limited use – see below); all are easy enough to use and switch between. It also has a tachymeter in the chapter ring (up to 500) and a neat little 24-hour subdial, great for telling at a glance whether you’re in the AM or PM if you get discombobulated. The watch doesn’t have every luxury function – no radio control, for instance – but it’s got more than you’d need on most days.

• Central/sweep second hand: Unlike many chronograph watches that use the central second hand for the chronograph function and relegate the time seconds hand to a subdial, this watch actually uses the central second hand to tell the time, and it only switches to the chronograph seconds when you put the watch in chronograph mode. I know many people want their chronographs to only use their second hands as part of the stopwatch function, but I personally hate that, so I’m counting this as a plus.

• Diver’s-style bezel: I like me some rotating bezels. It only turns in one direction, as diver’s watch bezels do, and whilst I personally don’t get a lot of use out of it, it’s still a nice thing to have in the event that you want to measure elapsed or remaining time without using the chronograph. Love the glow-in-the-dark 12-o’clock dot, too.


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The strap is a handsome brown leather with a nice luster.

• Strap: I gotta credit the brown croco-leather strap. The photos I saw make it look a bit too garish, almost reddish in some shots, but in real life it looks nicer: it’s a darker tone in most indoor settings, and it has some nice shine to it under direct light. It looks and feels high-quality, and even the crocodile leather texture, which I wasn’t crazy about, is growing on me. The only nitpick is the strap was very stiff at first, but working it for a bit got it loosened up just fine.

• Lume: I love a watch with bright luminescent paint on the hands and hour markers. As is typical of Citizen, this watches delivers: even after being exposed to nothing brighter than indoor lighting, the hands and hour markers are perfectly readable in the dark and remains so for hours. I can go to bed for eight hours and it’ll still be legible when I wake up, whilst other watches I have go dark in less time than it takes to sit through a movie. It also gets surprisingly bright when charged under a strong light like the sun; go from outdoors on a clear afternoon to a shady interior and your wrist will glow like a miniature flashlight even before your eyes have adjusted.


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The Brycen has strong and long-lasting lume, especially on the hands.

• Size: This watch is somewhat on the larger side, but the thin lugs make it so it doesn’t look oversized even on a smaller wrist. It’s a bit tall at 13 mm, but it still sits on your arm quite comfortably and slides under most sleeves just fine.

• Weight: This is all-platinum and it shows: at just 2.5 ounces, it’s easy to forget you’re even wearing it at times. Less ideal for anyone who prefers heftier pieces, but if you don’t like watches with their own center of gravity, this is for you.

• Water resistance: With a water resistance rating of 200 meters (650 feet), you never have to worry about water damage unless you dive deep enough to require an air tank, at least so long as you don’t operate the crown or pushers underwater. Shower, swim or surface-dive with this baby without a care. (That said: Try to avoid prolonged contact with water so long as it’s on its leather strap, since leather does not like water. If you plan on testing this baby’s water resistance, swap it out with a metal, rubber or nylon strap first.)

• Scratch-resistant case and crystal: A common issue with both platinum cases and mineral crystals, both of which this watch has, is that they tend to scratch easily, with regular platinum being much softer than stainless steel and mineral being less resistant than the sapphire crystals preferred by true watch snobs. I don’t know whether Citizen used hardened versions of both on this watch, but scratching hasn’t been an issue in the weeks I’ve had it. Even after bumping it around plenty on doorknobs and walls and so on – I’m an incurable klutz – and it’s yet to develop even the slightest nick or scratch anywhere on it. Of course, I expect this to change over time – again, klutz – but anyone worrying that the platinum or the mineral crystal may become scratch magnets can relax with this watch.

• Pricing: For the build quality (platinum watches can be a little more expensive), quality of the movement (more on that below) and all the functionality packed into this watch, the price is right where it arguably should be, with a list price/MRSP of US $425; you can easily find it for $300 or less on Amazon or eBay. I even lucked out and found mine on sale for US $140 (CA $200 total with shipping) on Amazon.com on Black Friday, which I’m still pretty pleased about.

The Beautiful

• Light-powered: As a Citizen Eco-Drive model, this is a solar watch that’s powered by any light you give it. Wear this watch regularly and keep it exposed to anything from direct sunlight to interior lighting on a daily basis, and it’ll keep ticking forever. The E812 caliber (movement) also has a nice and lengthy 9-month power reserve, so you can pop the Brycen into a drawer for months at a time without a worry.

• Accuracy: Even by quartz watch standards, the Brycen keeps extremely good time. Though officially rated at +/- 15 seconds per month (pretty standard for quartz), measuring the one I have with an app reveals it’s only running fast by approximately 0.08 seconds a day (roughly 2.5 per month), which is just a fraction beyond the COSC chronometer threshold for quartz watches (0.07 secs./day). You could forget to set this watch for a decade and it would only have slid out of sync by less than five minutes – perfect if you plan on getting stranded on a deserted island for years.

• Precise handling: This may be less important to most people, but as a sharp-eyed, detail-oriented dude, I get easily bugged when the hands on a watch don’t line up just right with the markings on the dial face. Even some multi-hundred-dollar watches don’t bother with it, which I find inexcusable. Thankfully, you won’t find such laziness with this watch, where the hands align with the dial markings just right.

The Nitpicks

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The size is good for most wrists.

• Black dial blues: I went into this purchase thinking this would have a dark blue dial, but no matter how I angle it in the light, it seems to be mostly black, or perhaps just a very dark, midnight sort of blue – it’s hard to say for certain. People who like black dials won’t care of course, but it’s still something I’m a little disappointed with.

• Uncolored bezel: To me, part of the appeal of a diver’s bezel is that they’re usually colored, either black or a nice dark blue (to match the commonly blue dial face), which helps with legibility in underwater environments. The polished silvery platinum bezel here certainly isn’t ugly by any standards, but I do wish Citizen offered variants with a colored bezel.

• Polished & brushed finish: Another personal peeve is that the case finishing is polished in some places (namely the sides and the bezel) and brushed in others (such as the lug tops and the case sections between lugs). Most people either wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t care, but I prefer when watches have either one or the other – switching from a shiny reflective surface to a more dull, matte one around the corner feels odd to me, as if the polisher missed some spots.

• No DST: Unlike some much cheaper (typically digital) watches, this one doesn’t have an automatic or quick way to move the hour up or down for daylight savings in places where that applies. Myself, I just use daylight savings as an opportunity to sync my watch with Internet time, so doing that twice a year ensures the piece is never off by more than 15 seconds or so. I suppose you could use the local time function for this, but that only really works if you don’t actually need it for its intended purpose. Either way, it’s no real issue, since most analog watches don’t have a DST setting anyway, but it would’ve been fun to have it included.

• Pin buckle: Another personal preference is that after wearing the Citizen BL5470-57L (review coming up eventually here) for years before switching to this watch, going from the ease and simplicity of a foldover deployment clasp to the fiddliness of a traditional pin buckle left me somewhat unimpressed. I already plan to swap the bracelet out for a rubber one with a deployment clasp, and will update this review once it comes in.

The Bad

• Speaking of the pin buckle: A more serious issue with the standard buckle is that it chafes somewhat. I like my straps tight enough that the watch doesn’t jiggle around on my wrist, and as a result the somewhat sharp edges of the buckle dig into the skin and can cause some minor irritation, especially if you move it a lot. This is a fairly minor issue, and it hasn’t sent me scrambling for another buckle or anything, but I feel that Citizen could have planned ahead and sanded the buckle’s skin-oriented corners down just a tad.

• Plastic hands: I generally like the look & feel of the watch, but one thing that stops me from loving it is that the hands are all white plastic, which doesn’t exactly exude quality. My previous watch, the BL5470-57L, had polished stainless hands, and going from that to the cheaper plastic hands here felt like a downgrade, even though both watches are in the same price range. (Though, one slim silver lining is that the extra white does make the hands ever so slightly easier to read at different angles without dark reflections getting in the way, but I’d still prefer that polished look, really.)

• Dial(s) layout: Speaking of design, whilst I like the layout of the dial and its subdials, the overall look of it feels just a bit cluttered. The subdials are a tad larger than they arguably need to be – if the upper dials were moved down to the 9 and 3 positions it would go a long way towards freeing up some space. I also don’t like how some of the numbers are cut off by the subdials, though that’s more of a preference thing – reversing the Arabic numerals and indices would look better in my view.

• Dial look & feel: Also, whilst I like the slight tile patterning of the dial, it does feel a bit plastic-y, especially with the hour markers that are just painted on. To be fair, this is excusable in a $400 watch; I don’t expect $2,000-level quality here. But it’s another area in which my similarly priced BL5470-57L looks just a bit better.

• Bezel alignment: It’s hard to know whether this is a design flaw or just a quirk of my particular watch, but the bezel is just ever so slightly off-center regardless of its position, teetering slightly to the right by about half a millimeter or so. It’s small enough that most wouldn’t notice it, but in a watch where the makers took care to make sure the hands were aligned with the dial markers, it’s disappointing.


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Case side. The crown guard makes pulling the crown out a pain.

• Crown usability: The crown guard is a good thing, protecting the crucial mechanism from accidental knocks, but it also makes the crown rather difficult to pull out and use. This isn’t a screw-down crown that you twist until it pops out; you have to pull at it or use your nails, which the guard makes hard to do. I need to slide my finger underneath the side of the watch and angle the corner of my nail just right to dig into the seam between the crown and the case to get it to pop out enough to use, which, whilst not terribly difficult to do, gets a bit annoying in the long run, especially if you need to switch modes a lot.

• Weak alarm: The Brycen may have an alarm, but I’m not sure how much use it is – in fact, I’ve never used it, for this and one more reason (mentioned below). The alarm sound isn’t very loud at all, so that you can’t rely on it to wake you up from a particularly good nap, much less a solid sleep. It also only lasts for 15 seconds rather than something like 30. It’s better to use it as a reminder to check the oven or something rather than for making sure you wake up on time for you important early meeting.

• Complex: The complexity of setting the watch is a common complaint for this and similar models. Using the watch and switching between its modes is simple enough – pull the crown, twist to select mode, push back in, you’re done – but configuring the time and the perpetual calendar properly when you first get this watch is something you’ll absolutely need the manual for unless you want to hopelessly botch it up. Thankfully, you only need to do this once; the perpetual calendar and the light-powered movement ensure you will probably never need to fully configure the watch a second time, but be prepared to spend a few minutes following the instructions the first time you take it out of the box.

The Shameful

• Slow mode changes: Switching between modes is easy, but if that includes the local time and alarm modes, be prepared to wait a while as you watch (no pun intended) the hands ever so slowly move to their assigned positions. I don’t know why Citizen had to make this motion of the hands so sluggish, but I hope they had a good reason, because as it is the delay in switching modes is the primary reason why I’ve never used the alarm on this watch (or the BL5470-57L, which has a near-identical movement) – leaving the room to fetch my cell, unlocking it and configuring an alarm is faster than waiting for the hands to reach their positions on this watch, and that’s just not good.

Final Thoughts:

Overall, the Brycen is an excellent little watch for anyone who wants a sportier or more casual look, and it has a raft of features that’ll cover most or all of your time-related needs. It’s pretty low-maintenance thanks to its incredible accuracy, perpetual calendar and light-powered movement, though people living in places with daylight savings will still need to adjust the time at least twice a year. It’s tough and easy to wear, and though the face has a bit of a plastic-y feel, at no point does it look cheap; this feels every bit like the $425 watch it is, and it’s perfect for just about any wrist and almost any occasion that isn’t strictly chic. Just don’t use it as your morning alarm.

Edit (01/13/18 @ 9:24 PM ET): Added a link to my Citizen BL5470-57L review.