If you desire a digital watch that doesn’t appear like a miniature smartphone in your wrist, there aren’t loads of trendy choices. One various to Timex and Casio’s choices is from Girard-Perregaux, which is resurrecting a classic digital design from the ‘70s in which displaying the time almost seems like an afterthought.

The first true digital watch to use an electronic display and a quartz crystal to keep accurate time was the Hamilton Pulsar P2 2900 LED released in 1972. It helped kick off a new era of timepieces that was not unlike the pre-iPhone smartphone days when companies experimented with unique designs in an attempt to find something consumers would wholeheartedly embrace. Back in 2020, Hamilton released an updated version of the Pulsar P2 2900 LED with an updated LCD-OLED hybrid display that recreated the appearance of the original’s now antiquated show. Continuing with that development, Girard-Perregaux is doing the identical with one other ‘70s-era digital wearable.

The Hamilton Pulsar P2 2900 LED looked more or less like a traditional watch with the moving hands replaced by a digital screen. Girard-Perregaux took advantage of the unique watchmaking opportunities that electronic innovations offered at the time and in 1976 created the Casquette with the time displayed on the bottom edge of the watch’s predominant physique.

Girard-Perregaux is re-releasing the Casquette 44 years later because the Casquette 2.0, and whereas it options extra trendy electronics inside, it nonetheless sports activities a charmingly retro lo-fi LED show with glowing purple digits. As with the unique, urgent one of many buttons on the Casquette 2.0 shows the time for a few seconds, which the corporate claims will present round two years of battery life with common day by day use. But the brand new model doesn’t simply inform the time and date anymore. The Casquette 2.0 provides the power to maintain monitor of the time in a second time zone, a chronograph, and a peculiar “secret date” operate that routinely shows a selected date as soon as a day for 20 seconds at a specified time to remind you of a particular anniversary.

The Casquette 2.0 additionally contains a scratch-resistant case and bracelet fabricated from ceramics that’s paired with grade 5 titanium used for the buttons, case again, and the Girard-Perregaux brand on prime. The unique Casquette was restricted to an 8,200-piece run over the 2 years it was produced, however the brand new 2.0 model is being restricted to simply 820, with a price ticket of $4,700. Expensive, sure, however imagine it or not, the brand new version is already sold out online.