Product Review: Casio GD400 G-Shock Watch

I own a bunch of watches.  They’re not rich man watches; they are the indulgence of a guy with practical tastes and a flair for useful and inexpensive tools.  My all-time favorite watch, hands down, is the Casio G-Shock GD400 series, with a personal preference for the olive green one.  I’ll get to that in a second (hahahaha…a time pun).

I first bought a similar Casio in turquoise and orange, almost as an impulse buy.  I had purchased a set of shoes from Nike or Adidas or somebody in turquoise and orange, and then (probably because I had searched for them online) I started seeing pop up ads for the Casio.

I know it’s weird.   I mean, what kind of a motorcycle guy buys a watch to match his shoes?  (You don’t need to answer that.) The watch arrived a few days later and I liked it.  I was in and out of CSC a lot when I bought the watch and the shoes (we were getting ready for a CSC Baja ride), and I caught a bit of flack for being a fashion plate.  That’s how it goes sometimes when you’re a famous and well-dressed blogger.

I liked the watch, and I loved its phenomenal accuracy.  I went to www.Time.gov (that’s the official US government time), and the Casio was running exactly even with the government website over the span of a month.  That’s really good.

The Casio has a bunch of features I never really use and some I use a lot.  It’s got a stopwatch, a timer, and an alarm.  It’s got a calendar and it shows the day of the week.  You can have it show regular time or military time. You can set it so that if you flick your wrist, the backlight comes on. And you can press the G button and the thing lights up.  I use the Casio as a flashlight three or four times every night…you older guys will know what that’s all about.  And by pressing the buttons mounted on the case side you can find the time in just about any time zone in the world.  That comes in handy on many of my overseas secret missions.

I wore the watch for several years, and then on another CSC Baja trip the battery went south on me.  The battery had the good manners to do this in Guerrero Negro, where there are a few stores.  I asked the guy who took us to see the whales on that trip which store would have a battery and he pointed one out on our way to the docks.   After seeing the whales and having a couple of fish tacos at Tony’s, I rode my RX3 to the place the guide had mentioned.  Nope, they didn’t sell watch batteries, but the farmacia two doors down did.  Okay, so I went to the farmacia two doors down.  Nope, they didn’t have watch batteries, but another farmacia two doors on the other side of the first store did.

Then things got interesting.   They had the battery, but the lady behind the counter told me I had to open the watch and change the battery myself.  The watch has these tiny little screws and I was wearing my contact lenses, which gives me great far field vision but lousy near field vision.   She gave me a little box of tiny screwdrivers, but I couldn’t see the screws very well and I tried to explain my predicament to the very nice lady, but she didn’t speak English.  So, I took my right contact out (they’re one-day disposables, so it wasn’t a big deal) and I basically did a roadside repair.

The watch lit up as soon as the battery went in, but the rear cover is orientation sensitive and I got it wrong.  The watch crystal fogged within an hour, and by the end of the day, the watch called time out (hahahaha …another time pun).  The time out, unfortunately, was permanent.  When I returned to So Cal, I took it to the guy who normally sells (and installs) watch batteries for me, but it was too late.  The watch was toast.

I missed having that watch on my wrist, and I tried to buy it again.   But it turns out that Casio changes the colors frequently on this particular model. Not only had the turquoise and orange version been discontinued, but now it was collectible.  I had paid $72 for mine, but by this time used ones were going for close to $400 on Ebay.

A week or two later, another secret mission, and I found myself killing time (wow, a third time pun!) in a mall in New Jersey, and I saw the OD green version of the GD400 Casio.  The sales guy and I went back and forth a little, and $92 later (tax included), the watch you see in the big photo at the top of this blog left with me.  Like I said, it’s just about the perfect watch and I wear it nearly all the time.

More good news?  I liked that turquoise and orange G-Shock watch, too, so I called Casio’s US importer and asked them if they could repair it.  I had to spend another $60, but that’s okay.  There’s only one thing that’s better than one Casio GD-400 G-Shock, and that’s two of them.  The GD400 model comes in a variety of other colors, too, and they typically go for around $100 on the Internet.   Trust me on this…if you want a good watch for every day bouncing around, you can’t go wrong with a G-Shock Casio.

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More watches?  You bet.   Looky here!

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More on Baja and the CSC Baja expeditions?  Absolutely!

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