Casio G-Shock GT-003 the official pizzicato five G-Cool

Another cold and snowy day today, so a hard wearing watch is the best. And so it's another Casio G-Shock for today's post.

The one I'm wearing today is another in the G-Cool G'Mix range of G-Shock. The G-Cool watches are designed with a more musical theme than the standard G-Shocks. This particular one has more of a musical theme than most as it is a special edition collaboration with the Japanese group the pizzicato five (-they normally don't use capital letters in the name). Pizzicato five was formed in 1985 as a pop band and has morphed through different styles as the years progressed, and they released an album every year. Their most well known version was through the 90s and  paid homage to 60s American pop music, but they have covered soul, funk, jazz, folk, pop, and electronica too. The band broke up in 2001, three years after the watch was released.

It uses a 1699 module and has 3 parts to the display. The main display is a 6 digit LCD with smaller seconds, and is where the time and other modes are displayed. The next display is an inverse blue LCD panel across the top which shows the day and date over two lines. The last bit is a small oval inverse blue LCD which is split into segments that fill and empty (at 5 seconds per segment).

The watch has the usual stopwatch and alarm functions, and also has a bpm feature (which is also seen on other G-Cools). With the bpm feature, you press the front button with the beat for 5 beats, and it tells you the bpm. When not in bpm mode, the front button activates the electroluminescent back-light, which shows a red *** logo behind the time.

This watch has a model number of GT-003, but I don't know the sub-number. It was a special edition of the G-Cool GT-003 and has a different backplate compared to the standard model (which states it is "the official pizzicato five model G-Cool (c) 1998"). It came in 5 colours, and had an original cost of 23,000 yen.