The negative LCD rant

Using the 85mm macro lens of the Canon RP is just making the negative display on my GM-S5600 look worse. In past posts I often remarked that Casio should be commended for creating a display that manage to look like sh*t under all viewing and lights angles, but it turn out that I was mistaken. It only take a macro lens to see that things can get much worse with no effort at all.

I admit that it's possible to get better shots with a less stellar lens, such as the one that I have on my older Canon G12, and by using a CPL filter to cut on the reflections and increase the contrast. It help by masking how bad negative displays are just like a camouflage net, and it's about as useful in real life. It's when I can zoom in with a real macro lens that I can see how bad a negative display is. And unfortunately, it's not only on photos.

The low contrast is playing catch-up with the terrible viewing angles to create the impression that the display is permanently immersed under the water of a murky swamp. It's so close to being perfectly useless that the GM-S5600 is one of two watches that I wear exclusively on days when I don't care about reading the time. The other being the skeletonized CIGADesign Z which is in a class all of its own.

As a reliable time reading device the GM-S5600 is a complete failure. Oh, it's reliable enough, being a real G-Shock etcetera, it's just the part of time reading that is a disaster because CASIO decided to sacrifice legibility and usability on the altar of tacticoolness.

Tacticool, for those who are unfamiliar with the term, is a polite way to describe idiocy masquerading as military equipment. It's something which in the best case is completely useless, and in the worst will actively endanger its user. Its main reason for existing is that it looks "cool".

I'm sure that looking cool is important and that a professional photographer would have no problems with making the negative display on the diminutive G-Shock look legible and crisp. With the same degree of certainty I can be sure that this hypothetical photographer has never used real any military equipment, because a soldier's life depends on mobility and for being effective every gram of weight count. You can bet that no one will ever end up carrying something extra whose main characteristic is that it's unusable for most of the time.

Which makes you wonder why I bother at all with it. Well, my soldiering days are way behind me and I'm no longer concerned with reading the time as an absolute necessity. What I do like about the GM-S5600 is that it's still a real G-Shock despite its horrendous display, and that it kind of look good when I wear it.

Which is about the best excuse anyone can have for reasoning wearing a watch.