Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Casio is smart not to add clutter underneath

As you would expect, the movement is also solar (any light actually) powered ("Tough Solar"), and atomic clock radio controlled. Actually, being an analog watch might be of benefit to power generation. You can see that most of the dial is a photo-receptive solar panel - larger than the smaller ring used in the all digital screen models. Like other high-end pathfinder models, the watch can receive signals from your local atomic clock to sync to the correct time perfectly each day. This is actually one of the most complex functions in these phones, but you can set it to auto receive each night. I recommend looking through the instructions if you wish to fiddle with the "RC" (radio controlled) functions. I have to admit that even though the watch dial is really busy on the PAW-5000 watch, it isn't that tough to read - in fact, I would say it is easy to read. Casio is smart not to add clutter underneath where the hands travel (too much), which greatly assists with legibility. I personally find the hands easy to spot and they have a high contrast with the dial. So legibility is good! Casio took some inspiration from the popularity of the Tissot T-Touch family of watches. Not in the "touch" department, but in using the hands for some of the features. Thus, the orange seconds hand is used a lot in the various functions. It isn't quite as slick as in the T-Touch watches, but the Casio is clearly much less expensive (and will probably last longer). As such, the seconds hand is used as the compass needle in the compass mode, to assist with the barometer reading, to see what timezone you are switching to in the world time function (see the abbreviated reference cities spelled out around the dial), and a few other things. Casio does a good job making you feel that the analog part of the watch plays nicely with the Pathfinder part of the watch.

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