As I sit down to write this fifth installment of my Casio AE1200 saga, I have come to realize that it may never end. The AE1200 “Casio Royale” is cheap as dirt, easy to tinker with, and hard to destroy. It also enjoys a burgeoning supply of aftermarket parts to make nearly every customization dream come true. In today’s installment, I will ignore the outside of the watch and set my sights on the module itself with a negative LCD mod.
To accomplish this, you need your watch, a screwdriver to remove the backplate and module, an X-acto knife or razor blade, a steel ruler, some rubbing alcohol, a lint-free cloth, some watchmaker’s putty like Bergeon Rodico for dust, and an adhesive-backed polarizing film. You can find the film on Amazon, eBay, and some photography supply shops. Mine arrived from Amazon as loose sheets in a stiff envelope.
Once you have liberated the module (a straightforward process that I already covered in Part 2), you will need to get your blade. Leave the battery in. You’ll need to see how that display reacts soon. LCD screens work by lighting pixels behind a polarizer. To change the display, strip off the old polarizing layer and apply a new one. It sounded daunting, but I reminded myself that the watch cost all of $20 and whipped out my blade.
Carefully catch a corner. That layer is pretty well-defined once you find the edge, and you can gently work the blade through the adhesive. Work slowly, and you will be able to separate the two without scratching the face below. It should come off in one clean piece.
Or not. I know it looks bad, but it isn’t. I had no problem lifting from the opposite corner to finish the job. Those awful-looking marks were just leftover glue. A wise denizen of the Custom Casios Club on Facebook told me you could start it with the blade and then use a guitar pick or credit card to do the rest of the job with far less risk of damaging either the polarizing layer or the screen beneath.
This half-and-half shot provides a good demonstration of what the polarizer does. With the film, you see an image. Without the film, the screen is blank. Note that the map and clock dial are printed, not pixels, so you can see them without the polarizer. I’ve seen folks disassemble the module itself, so the screen is completely free of the plastic shroud, but I did not, and it worked just fine.
Now you can play with your new film. Polarizing filters are directional, so you will want to rotate your sheet over the module until you get the desired result. Really, there are just two options: a clear positive and a clear negative. They will be 90 degrees apart. Anything in between will have insufficient contrast. Once you find the right direction, mark it on the film, then cut a swatch about the size of the display. If it’s a little too big, that’s ok. You can trim it to fit. It does not have to be precisely the same size as what came off — although if you managed not to mangle what came off and can use it as a template, that would be ideal. You don’t want the film extending beyond the screen and overlapping the shroud, but remember that all this will sit behind a faceplate, so if it’s a tiny bit too small, no one will notice.
Now that you have your new film, you have reached the point where you won’t need to keep fiddling with everything so that you can clean it up. I used a dab of rubbing alcohol and eyeglass wipes to remove the adhesive residue from the screen. Then I went at it with the Rodico to eliminate any dust. The film requires less cleaning and more care. It should have three layers: a clear protective layer on top, the polarizing film itself in the middle, and a clear protective layer over the adhesive. Do the adhesive first, secure it to your newly cleaned LDC screen, then peel off the top layer. Voila! Negative display. Reassemble.
One of the things that made me question the wisdom of this mod was that it looked unreadable in so many of the photos online (or even the photo directly above). This is more a function of how hard it can be to photograph digital displays. In real life, even the small bits are perfectly legible. Still, there are compromises. The clock hands in the top left are barely visible, but to be fair, they are pretty crappy on the factory positive display too. The clock’s crosshairs disappear because remember, they are printing, not pixels. You put a dark layer over black printing, and it’s just gone. The same goes for the world map. The sliver showing the time zone still lights up, but it’s less impressive.
That is a shame, but I haven’t liked many of the mixed-polarization mods I’ve seen. I also wanted to get through this project before I tried replacing the polarizing layer with multiple bits of differently-oriented film. Besides, I thought all that black would work well on my Darth Royale project.
All in all, it was a rather painless process. Enough so that I have ordered some color polarizing film sheets to get even more variety in my modded Casio collection. But for now, I will move on to my none-more-black model with a black case, buttons, bracelet, and faceplate by SKXMod.com. Stay tuned…
