Citizen is a Japanese based company that started making watches in 1924. The company also produces small electronic devices -- organizers, miniature televisions and calculators – essentially declaring that it targets customers who seeks utility and reliability rather than luxury and high-end design. Consequently, Citizen watches are not luxury timepieces, and are not intended as such. Price is an important aspect in the company's outspoken general goal of achieving broad appeal, and Citizen reach that goal by using relatively basic materials and focusing on the quality of movement and development of new lines. Today, in the 21^st century, Citizen offers over 300 models and sub-models of watches, and is one of the largest watchmakers in the world.

Citizen's variety of collections and lines is truly awe-inspiring: you immediately get the sense that you're dealing with a powerful company that can afford to branch into various, sometimes contradictory, paths of design. The best known and selling collections are probably the sports hawk lines: the Nighthawk, the Skyhawk, the Sailhawk and the Navyhawk collections. These watches exhibit busy, often to the extreme, dials with multiple sub-dials for various special purposes. The hawks parse, dissect and reconstruct time, presenting us with easily consumable seconds, minutes and hours. The dials often incorporate small LCD displays to assist in time reading and analysis. In one word: impressive.

Besides several other worthy collections (which we will examine in this series), Citizen is also known for it's advanced technology and generally tech-friendly innovative attitude. I think that this fact shouldn't come as a surprise – Citizen is, after all, a relatively new player in the watch world, and it had and has to push forward in order to make a name for itself. Citizen will undoubtedly fill a few pages of watchmaking history with its Eco-Drive technology that harnesses light – natural and artificial – in order to propel the gear inside its chronographs and watches.