Quickie Gear Review: The G-Shock DW5092

Recently my main everyday watch for the past 8.5 years finally gave up the ghost. It’s an inexpensive black Japanese digital watch, the definition of disposable. It is the G-Shock DW5092 and in the time I have owned it, it has been through the following and more:  

-Countless field exercises at Ft Riley, Ft Polk, Ft Pickett, Ft Lee, and a particularly sweltering 2 week summer woods excursion at Ft. Knox

-Plethora of camping trips, including several at high elevation (highest 12,000 feet in Colorado)

-Several bitter subzero Midwestern winters

-6 solid years on a support hand while firing rifles from 22LR to 45-70 and just about everything in between

-4 Combat Water Survival tests

-2 years working on a cattle feed lot

-2 nonconsecutive years in a desk drawer while I tested other watches

Sadly this is pretty much the only picture I have of myself doing something cool while wearing this watch.

The DW5092 is currently tied with the DW5600E as the cheapest watch offered in the G-Shock series currently at $69.95 (link to G-Shock section on Casio website: https://www.gshock.com/black-digital-watches) and it is even cheaper on sites like Amazon for $46.

I bought the watch August of 2013 and only just now the week of this publication has the display finally faded to the point where it is unreadable and the backlight no longer works. During this time it has been my main EDC watch with the exception of a few trysts with some other watches that I wanted to try out. Short summary of those below:

-Marathon General Purpose- Case size bothered me (small but very thick), took to a field exercise last summer and big temperature shifts from morning to afternoon would cause the glass to fog up (same happened in the one hot shower I got). Strap also absorbed moisture like a sponge and reeked horribly.

-Casio F91W- too small and it also had a bipolar episode one day at 3am when the alarm went off for no reason and after 2 minutes of vainly mashing buttons to get it to stop, smashed it with a ball peen hammer.

-Suunto Core- too hard for my Grug brain to understand.

To be fair, I can’t review too many of the features since I only used it for time (used the alarm literally once) and the only instances where I touched the settings buttons was adjusting for time zone/daylight savings. But just for durability and longevity, it has been fantastic. Most research I have done on this watch says the battery life on them is about 5 years, so how mine managed to hold out for another 3.5 past that is beyond me.

The only negatives I’ve observed with this watch is exposure to sunlight has caused the resin strap to crack over time, the retaining band snapped at one section, and the buttons began to stick after only 4ish years and would require a knife blade or something similarly rigid to depress the button enough to register.

Like I mentioned previously, the watch finally died just this last week and given the low price of the overall package, I figured this one had lived a noble life and I would simply plop down another $46 for a new one and allow this one to pass on to the great watch landfill in the sky. But over the course of writing this review, my nostalgia got the better of me and I decided to get off my lazy ass, go out and buy a $5 CR2016 battery, and actually open up the back plate and try to revive my longtime friend. Sub 1 minute videos really help increase my confidence in my ability to do a job and this one did the trick in this instance:

Full recovery (took me 3m 31s from the time I put the new battery in place to actually get everything back together and the pic set up)

Sure I’m biased since its pretty much the only watch I’ve ever bothered keeping for an extended period (I also have an automatic German fleiger for dressier occasions), but I would say my experience with the G-Shock DW5092 has convinced me it’s the only serious use watch I’d ever need.

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