Cheap chrono, in both senses of the word

I am not a huge fan of chronographs, as I cannot really see myself using much of its functionality. But I own 30 going on 40 watches, and wanted to give the concept a chance, without breaking the bank. That chance was always either a quartz or mecaquartz.

So, when Ochstin brought out this cheap quartz chrono (I paid £16.23 including shipping for this G125G) I pulled the trigger. I had good experiences with Ochstin before.

The watch is available in two colour variants for the dial (white or black). The white dial comes with a blue bezel, the black dial with either a silver or a black bezel. There were also options for the watchband - I went with "leather" rather than a nylon strap.

At first glance the watch looks great, probably a clone of a much more expensive watch, except: when I asked on watchcrunch nobody could name the exact watch this may be based on.

At second glance, trying out the functionality... We do have chronograph functionality, i.e. the pushers on the right operate a stopwatch, and that stopwatch measures fractions of a second too, but: the pusher on the left is a dummy, it operates nothing; the pushers on the right give the outward look of screw-down pushers, but they are not.

The dial:

• the 5-minute markers are applied and catch the light nicely
• the blue second hand color-matches the bezel and stands out nicely from the watch, the hour/minute hands are white with silver edges and can get easily camouflaged by the dial - note that this problem goes away with the black dial version
• the three-day date window is nicely done
• the three subdials come to life once you start the chrono function: on the left are the minutes, at the bottom the seconds, at the the top fractions of a second - out of 60 though. So, measuring some event might give you 12 and 7/60 seconds. Is this normal??

The watchband...

...is "genuine leather", matt [the leather band coming with the black dial is not though], blue on top, yellow on the inside; it has bad and good points, but not necessarily what you might expect: 

• good 1: this is a substantial and comfortable band, not too stiff as many of its cousins
• good 2: the (substantial) buckle is signed
• bad 1: the thorn of the buckle is too short, so that this band could not be fastened. I asked for £5 refund which I did get. How this ever passed QC is a mystery to me.
• bad 2: the blue side of the band likes to share its blueness with your skin
• bad 3: the watchband is too long and lacks holes. My wrist isn't large, but not supersmall either, but I needed to drill an extra hole into the band to make it wearable and it is still a tad loose; as a result the (replacement) buckle sits on the side of my wrist, not underneath

Overall, this is a large (44mm) and large wearing watch. Some of the issues diminish if you get yourself the black dial on a nylon strap, but still I cannot recommend the piece.

Addition: one small thing I forgot to mention. We all know these largely useless instruction booklets that tell us how to set time/date on a three-hander with date window as if we did not know. Once you are getting into 3-pusher chronos they are not quite so useless anymore, except... this booklet tells us about the watch types of the Ochstin range, and it hadn't not been updated yet to include this type.