Reddit mentions of Citizen Men's JY0005-50E "Eco-Drive Skyhawk A-T" Stainless Steel Watch

Eco Drive is one of the best battery technologies out there. The battery is made of titanium ions I believe. I have two Eco Drive watches myself (a 300m diver and a 200m pilot watch). They are incredibly accurate and will last for about 25+ years if allowed direct sun exposure for at least an hour every few weeks. I leave mine out by my glass door for a few hours every 3 weeks or so.
Here are my watches (Amazon links)
http://www.amazon.com/Citizen-JY0005-50E-Eco-Drive-Skyhawk-Watch/dp/B0019KDIEA/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1375974120&sr=8-3&keywords=Citizen+skyhawk

http://www.amazon.com/Citizen-BN0000-04H-Eco-Drive-Professional-Rubber/dp/B000EQS1RO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1375974156&sr=8-2&keywords=Citizen+divers
Hope you have many years of enjoyment out of your watch!

Note that black-colored watches typically mean that any scratches/wear can show the underlying shiny metal below the black coating. This typically applies to watches of any color except for plain stainless steel or titanium.

Seiko is a good company, and that watch should be good. Whether it's worth that money is really your call.

"Best entry level watch" is highly variable, and depends upon your personal preferences. For example, most people here prefer inaccurate mechanical watches.

A couple of cheaper solar/atomic options would be:

• The no-longer-in-production Citizen JY0005-50E "Skyhawk Black Eagle" (the amazon name is incorrect). Dial is horribly busy, with an awful user interface that is controlled by pulling out the crown. However, to pull out the crown, you have to unbuckle the watch or take it off. The digital display can show the date, OR a stopwatch, OR a timer, etc.. If it shows the date, it's the date of the second timezone, which means that, in order for the date to be generally useful, you have to set the second timezone to be the same as your current timezone.
  
  (Yes, I have one, and I have no idea what possessed me to get it.)
  
  
• Citizen AT4007-54E Perpetual Chrono A-T (~$420 at amazon). I just rummaged through Citizen's current catalog to find this, and I have no idea how good (or bad) this is.
  
  Personally, I'd spend a lot less money on a much cheaper boring/digital solar/atomic watch, and spend ~$900 on a solar/GPS one, which synchronizes worldwide, like a Citizen Satellite Wave watch. However, even this isn't quite perfect:
  
  
• Unlike atomic watches, this GPS watch doesn't automatically turn on/off daylight savings (the GPS signal does not contain this information). You have to manually toggle this on/off.
  
  
• Unlike atomic watches, which can synchronize once a day, this watch only synchronizes every 6 or so days. However, to compensate for this, the watch is also a semi-high-accuracy quartz watch, which is accurate to within 5 sec a month in the absence of a GPS signal.
  
  
• This watch only synchronizes outdoors, in bright light (but it has a fast, "3-second" sync option).
  

I am loving this watch so I'm happy to oblige. I started my search for a new watch right here on r/watches and saw Citizen was a real crowd-pleaser. I compared many models ranging from about $200-$500 including:

• JY0005-50E
  
• JY0000-53E
  
• JY0064-00L
  
  I immediately fell in love with the CA0295-58E's simplicity and dark color scheme. I have very thin wrists so the smaller case diameter was a huge plus and the grey matches my titanium carbide wedding band perfectly.
  
  My wife purchased it for me on Amazon for $337 which, she said, was about $20 cheaper than what Macy's was selling it for.
  
  I like the look of the band but I am having a terrible time with it yanking out my arm hair. Is this a common problem? Should I just shave my wrist? :p
  

I did consider the Citizen titanium watches too. However, the design aspects, case width and lack of clutter made this watch a truly stand out.

The Skyhawk series from citizen are way too busy and not very readable at a glance as a result. Although they pack a lot of features into it. Problem is I'd pretty much never use those features.

The other set of watches I was strongly considering were the Christopher Ward aviation series.

I guess it depends on what you define as better. If it's features then sure Citizen offer more but more features doesn't necessarily mean usable or even required.