Discussion: Appropriate o watches

Is there a standard orienteering watch that has taken the place of the Casio "Accelator"? That fine watch seems no longer to be available.

Something like this would probably suit your needs. Plenty more available on ebay, just search for "casio lap watch".

Another option is to move to Canada and just use a regular watch - no need for split-taking watches anymore with SI :-)

I use my split-taking watch for a lot more things than just measuring the time between controls.

I just use the standard Timex Ironman 100 lap memory watch. It holds 5 separate runs and as long as you don't have over 100 split times in those five runs you're good. Also only costs like $40.

Unless they've fixed it recently, the Timex user interface is way worse than Casio's.

I vote for casio.

I was a long-time Casio user until my current watch, which is a 30-split Timex Ironman. I love it. It did take me a while to figure out the interface, but now I like it better. I find the screen to be more legible, too. Have both Casio and Timex gone away from glass? I hate the scratches in the plastic window.

There are a lot of variations of the Timex Ironman. I have a 200-lap memory model that appears to hold as many runs as I wish. They are dated and easy to recall or delete - I can recall splits forward or backward.

10 alarms that can be set 'daily'; 'every Tuesday.; 'weekdays'; esday'; 'weekends', etc. Interval, Countdown, Log, are among the options I rarely use.

However, their I-control version with the the circular rotating band did not work for me (on two different watches the band popped off).

Stretching the topic a bit, if I want to do intervals workouts based on time rather than distance, will the interval function on any Timex Ironman let me set it to beep after some time interval then beep again after a different time interval and repeat until I tell it to stop? And is it easy to program this behaviour? Any other brands/models better if this functionality is desired?

My Casio (Accelator) will do this, although I'm guessing the few of the people who own this watch know how to set it to get this behavior (and there are probably some who have their watches configured this way and can't figure out how to get it to stop doing this!). There's actually a limit of 50 repeats of the pair of times, but that should be adequate. One caveat is that the beep to indicate the end of an interval is somewhat subtle if the interval is short (just a single beep) although if it's longer (a minute is long enough), then it becomes a series of four bi-bi-bi-bips. I don't know whether the newer Casios have the same timer function or not.

My Ironman (saves 100 laps - but only 5 runs I discovered in dismay on vacation) lets me program up to 9 intervals that can repeat, so you could do a set of 4 hard/easy times, with a break between sets.

It seems to have the same sort of beep behavior as JJ's Casio - short intervals give a single beep, longer intervals give the alarm.

I do think I will hurt my wrist sometime, playing with the "Flix" feature, where you can flick your wrist to make the light come on when in "night mode".

If you've got some cash to burn and you enjoy gadgets with cool data I highly recomend Polar's RS400sd
It's a bit more than just a lap watch which may not be what people are after but with my experience of lap watches it gives unmatched features and ease of use. The UI is incredibly intuitive. It's made workouts and races more fun for me.