Timex "Expedition Field Chronograph 43mm" watch

-
Photo of watch

It's about a week since I bought one of these so I thought I'd jot down some of my first impressions of the timepiece.

My overall impression is positive. There are a couple of negative points that I'll deal with but, on the whole, I like this watch.

The build strikes me as being sturdy. There is no play in the crown or in the buttons and their operation is met with a reassuring amount of smooth friction.

The mechanism for setting the watch is slightly unconventional but it actually makes sense. Most analogue watches with date usually allow you to set the date by pulling the crown out to a first position, and then to set the time by pulling the crown out to a second position. This watch does things slightly differently because it also has to allow you to calibrate the chronograph before you use it for the first time. With the crown in the first position you can zero the chronograph's minutes hand (10 o'clock dial) and you can set the date by rotating the hours hand independently of the minutes hand. With the crown pulled out to the second position, you can zero the chronograph's seconds and tenths of a second (2 o'clock dial) hands.

When pulled out to its second position, rotation of the crown sets the hours and minutes hands of the watch. The gearing is such that the hands rotate slowly enough to allow accurate positioning of the minutes hand taking into account the seconds past the minute. E.g. you can pull the crown out when the seconds hand points to 0/60, which stops the watch. You then set the minutes hand to point precisely to the next minute and when that actual time is reached, push the crown back in, thus starting the watch at precisely that time.

The markings on the face are accurate. There are so many watches in the same price range as the Expedition Field Chronograph (ca. £110) that have irregularly-spaced markings. They make the minutes hand point directly to a given minute on one side of the dial but halfway between two minutes on the other side of the dial when the seconds hand is pointing to 0/60. Not so for this watch.

The face itself is actually quite readable, more so than the above photograph would lead you to believe. Legibility decreases with the level of ambient light and there are no phosphorescent "glow in the dark" markings on the watch face, but this is one of Timex's "Indiglo" watches. The face can be illuminated by an electroluminescent panel emitting blue light, although like any form of lighting, this is a drain on the battery that is huge compared to normal operation of the watch.

I have to admit that I wasn't a fan of the khaki-coloured fabric strap that came with this watch. Yes, it does match the watch face but I just didn't like it. I replaced it with a black leather strap matching the body of the watch. It's an easy and inexpensive "fix".

The chronograph needs calibrating before first use so that the hands actually point to zero when the chronograph is reset. The procedure is simple enough and only needs to be done once unless the watch is subjected to unusually high G-forces. Three hands indicate the chronograph time elapsed. The chronograph seconds hand is the long hand on the central axle (pointing to 36 on the photo), the minutes hand is on the dial at 10 o'clock reading from 0 to 30 and the 10ths of a second hand is on the dial at 2 o'clock and actually has a resolution of a 20th of a second (0.05s). This last hand does not move during chronograph operation; it is moved to point to the correct reading once a split time is displayed or the chronograph is stopped.

The seconds hand for timekeeping is on the dial at 6 o'clock. This may seem unusual to have it there rather than on the same axle as the hours and minutes hands but, once again, this decision makes practical sense. This dial is partially obscured by the hours hand between about 4:30 and 7:30 and by the minutes hand from about 20 minutes past the hour to 40 minutes past the hour. If it was the seconds hand of the chronograph, you would potentially have to wait for three hours to see how many seconds the chronograph is displaying. With it being the timekeeping seconds hand, you only have to wait a few seconds to see it again and the chronograph seconds hand is not obscured.

Having only owned this watch for about a week, it's far too early to think of accuracy. This said, it's looking good. As soon as I unboxed the watch, I synchronised it to a radiocontrolled clock that I have. Today, the watch is running maybe 0.2s faster than the clock. That equates to an inaccuracy of around one second per month, or somewhere between 10 and 12 seconds a year.

Would I recommend this timepiece? It matches more or less what I expect from a watch in this price range, so yes. I was pleasantly surprised by most things that I wasn't expecting and not really bothered by the rest.

Popular posts from this blog

HP Prime benchmark

-
Image
Err, right. The HP Prime is hardly a vintage calculator given that it was first released in 2015. Better still, HP released the so-called Prime "G2" in August 2018 with faster hardware, much more RAM to work with and double the storage space in flash memory. When that happened, there was no excuse, I had to get one. At the time of writing, the Prime G2 would appear to be available only in Europe. The Americas have been left by the wayside this time around. I bought mine from derekenwinkel.nl with whom I have no affiliation other than being a happy customer of theirs. As it became known that there was an updated version of the Prime, people in the Museum of HP Calculators Forum were interested in hard data showing the improvements in performance, so I went and wrote a benchmark. The benchmark in itself is probably of limited value in absolute terms but gives a good idea of the differences between different machines. A benchmark run can comprise up to th
Read more

Egg timer in a 41CX

-
Image
Now this is something unusual. Who would want to use a 30-year-old machine worth something as a mere egg timer, or use it at all in a kitchen, where it could easily get damaged? It just so happens that one of the machines in my collection is a SwissMicros DM41. It's built really solid and it's basically the same thing as a Hewlett Packard HP-41CX in a case the size of a credit card, so that means that it incorporates, among other things, a Time Module, which gives it a stopwatch, countdown timer and alarm capabilities. The DM41 is a great little piece of technology. However, the operative word here is "little". While its LCD is the same size as it's Voyager-sized big brother, the DM41L, its keys are just a bit too small for the device to be fully practical, but for some things its form factor makes it just right. Okay, it's more than an egg timer. This said, my DM41 gets used most of the time in the kitchen as a timer while I'm cooking. I keep i
Read more

Is it really a Hewlett Packard?

-
Image
There are two scientific calculators recently produced that, I'm afraid, fall into the cheap, plasticky category. They are the HP300s+ and the HP10s+. The question is, are they really Hewlett Packard machines at all? They are not. They are in fact Casios that have been rebadged to look like HP machines. Want proof? Watch this video with the HP10s+ showing its real colours. If you press the MODE key four times you get to the menu where you can alter display settings. There is an undocumented function in this menu where, if you press '2', you get to the contrast setting. This is not mentioned in the manual and, indeed, it has no effect, but look at what you get on screen when you press '2'. One good thing about this little machine is that I didn't even have to put a battery in it. The solar panel above the screen provides enough power to run the calculator as long as there's enough light around.
Read more