Retro vintage on the cheap

Watches from the 80’s are a bit of a curiosity because this was a decade of transition where at one stage both mechanical analog and digital quartz watches held the same market share.

Digital watches were cool during the 80’s. Almost every major brand had at least one high end digital model and they fetched premium prices. Hands and ticking movements went out of fashion and for a moment it seemed as if the only bottleneck for total digital domination was the production of the liquid crystal displays (LCD) on which the new watches relied.

Except that there were quite a lot of users who tried the digital marvels on their wrist and decided that to be accurate is good but being able to read a watch with one quick glance is even better. I know this to be true because I was one of these people, and I still remember the day when I saw for the first time the perfect answer to the problem of eating the cake and having it whole simultaneously.

It was an ana-digi watch.

A modern watch enthusiast might find it hard to believe, but normal watch users in the 80’s were fed up with mechanical watches and for us quartz digital watches were a godsend. Everything was better with digital, except that it made reading the time a bit more difficult. But with an ana-digi watch one could read the time using the analog hand and keep a small digital display to show the date or use it for other functions. As a bonus the digital display also advertised that you were wearing a modern quartz watch instead of a mechanical clunker. It was a true win-win for us and that’s how ana-digi watches gained a brief popularity.

But finding a nice vintage ana-digi watch in working condition that doesn’t look like a sad beaten-up tin can is not an easy task today. 80’s electronics were not reliable or long lasting and battery leakage was quite a common problem. Lucky for us Casio kept the flame going on and in 1995 they launched the retro looking ana-digi AQ-230.

It looks like an 80’s ana-digi, it even has the same basic functionality, but it’s made of plastic, or in Casio marketing jargon: chrome plated resin. This also extend to the crystal which will scratch like crazy and makes acrylic looks like a sapphire by comparison.

Still, it’s cheap enough to buy on a whim – which is exactly what I did. The diminutive 30mm size combined with the plastic build makes for a lightweight watch that practically disappears from the wrist, and the look is close enough to an 80’s watch to go full retro when you feel like it.