News · Casio

Why ana-digi watches work, and why they're suddenly everywhere again

Hands and an LCD panel are good at different things, which is the whole reason the ana-digi layout keeps coming back around.

Hen & Mills Editorial · 2 min read · 10 August 2026

Worn & Wound reckons this is the summer of ana-digi. Fair call, though the format never actually went anywhere. It just sat out about fifteen years of being unfashionable while Casio carried on making them regardless.

The mechanics are not complicated. A stepper motor drives the hands, an LCD panel handles the things hands are bad at. Your eye picks up rough time and position off an analogue dial faster than off a number, and picks an exact figure off a digital panel faster than off a dial. One watch, two readouts, each doing the work it is suited to.

Casio's GA-2100, and the button you keep jabbing

The GA-2100 is the example everybody reaches for. Slim octagonal case, proper hands, and a small digital window tucked between four and five o'clock. Hands say it's roughly twenty past. The window says the date is the 36th of, hang on, no, that's the stopwatch.

That's the standing catch with ana-digi and always has been. One small monochrome panel doing five jobs needs mode buttons, and mode buttons need you to keep track of which mode you're in. The good ones make the current mode obvious. The bad ones have you jabbing the bottom-right button four times while somebody is talking to you.

Four sensors, one dial: the GG-B100XMH-5A

Casio's Mudmaster GG-B100XMH-5A is the best argument going for the format. An altimeter reading from minus 700 to 10,000 metres, plus a barometer, a thermometer and a compass. No dial on earth shows that lot with hands.

So it doesn't try. The hands keep the time, the thing you check most and want to read without thinking about it. The panel carries whichever sensor you've asked for. The compass gets a hand pointing north as well, because a bearing is a direction and a direction belongs on a circle. Altitude gets digits, because 2,340 metres is a number, not a position.

Analogue quantity to the hands, counted quantity to the digits. Watch that done properly once and the pure-digital sensor watches start to look like they're doing more work than the job asks for.

Eighties fashion and a ceiling on square LCDs

Some of it is the obvious thing. The 1980s are fashionable again and this is what watches looked like then. Some of it is the digital-only revival hitting its ceiling. A market will absorb only so many square LCD reissues, and the format carries a built-in limit, which is that a bare number is a poor way to show how long is left.

And some of it is that the shape simply suits the moment. A round or octagonal dial with a small rectangular window sitting low on the face looks good right now, in a way the 1990s three-eye chronograph does not.

Not owned one before? Start cheap. The format either clicks for you inside a fortnight or it never does, and the ones that click tend to be the ones where you can tell the mode from across the room.