Q&Q Quartz Watches That Used to Be Good: A Review of Citizen’s Most Budget Watches

Q&Q watches are well known to domestic buyers: firstly, there are a lot of them. This is a fully mass product, and the idea of ​​»quantity» is taken literally into the name: it is an abbreviation for «Quantity&Quality». Yes, and the quality has not been lame before.

I first bought this watch 20 years ago, and so far they are, in general, go if you change the battery. And not so long ago, I decided that I want to know how the brand is doing these days, especially since at least one of the indicators — quantity — is increasing quite decently. So I became the owner of a watch for 900 rubles.

And no. Alas, this is a bad watch. Whether I was so unlucky or this is a trend, I won’t undertake to say, but almost nothing remains of the former Q&Q in this model.

Technically everything is still

Despite the fact that the modern Q&Q lineup has greatly added to the design, in fact it is still the same watch as before. Inside is the most budget Miyota quartz movement, and the watch itself is made in China. However, if before it worked well, now it works extremely poorly.

The situation I encountered and which I filmed on video: the second hand is effectively stationary in some positions. That is, the clock simply “sticks”, does not go.

Yes, they can be shaken up by tapping them a couple of times, but this is not quite what I expected from watches of this brand.

According to the materials — everything is also the same

Here, again, it is worth saying that Q&Q began to “add” in this direction, now the “Superior” collection has even stood out separately, where both steel and sapphire. But we are talking about the most ordinary watches, so there is nothing of value here: the case is made of metal, the coating is very flimsy and, in fact, it makes no sense to take “gold-plated”, as before. The coating will begin to peel off very quickly, and it will be ugly.

The glass here is mineral, the strap is leatherette. This is a very, very budget watch, although it tends to look expensive at the expense of design.

Appearance

Here it is worth saying that Q&Q really did well, although most of the design today is imitative design. In our case, we are mimicking a vintage watch and very skillfully using fairly sparse spiked hands, which is visually pleasing.

But all this does not compensate for the fact that the watch turned out to be bad in fact, they are reluctant to go, the hands do not hit the marks, the material has become worse than it was 20 years ago, and in the end: if you can get a good quartz watch for 900 rubles earlier, then now you will get frustrated…

Dimensions

I note in particular that the strap does not match the size of this model at all. The case diameter is about 40 mm. It’s not very small, actually, but the strap is too thin for this diameter and it looks unnatural and ugly.

With a male case diameter, the female thickness of the strap is here, and this is very striking.

Eventually

I was left disappointed, and I don’t understand how, by doing virtually the same thing, the result can be so much worse than before.

Q&Q never really spoiled either materials or calibers, and always just reproduced the same thing. But now — we suddenly get a very bad watch that is really good for nothing.

All this is disguised in good design, all this is marked with the «seal of Citizen», and as a result, the brand has degraded rather than grown. A similar situation, by the way, was with Lorus — the most budget daughter of Seiko, which is also not very happy …

There are links to VK and Cart in the signature if you are interested.

Good weekend!