Objectively Creative: A case of two Casios

Casio, no doubt best known for their cheap calculators or perhaps their beloved - and often also cheap - digital watches, this year announced two rather curious products:

  1. The S100X Urushi Edition calculator: a luxury calculator made of handcraft Japanese lacquer, limited to a production run of 650 units.
  2. The SXC-1 a portable standalone sampler - essentially a pocket-size audio synthesizer

The announcement of these items so close together got me thinking, they seemed to embody some ideas I've been churning over for some time...

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Some inspiration

Also around the time of these announcements, I'd been reading The Beauty of Everyday Things by Soetsu Yanagi. Yanagi was an art historian who advocated for the revival of traditional Japanese folk art. More than that, he seemed to think that folk art embodied a whole way of life, that the objects a society created represented that nature of that society at some fundamental level.

I wouldn't say I entirely agree with Yanagi's collectivist view but I did enjoy how he would look a specific object and derrive so many ideas from it so I thought perhaps I could try something similar looking at these two objects. So here we go...

A lacquer calculator you say

Beginning with the S100X (I'll just refer it this way for convenience), it is luxury item with essentially the same functionality as a standard plastic Casio calculator.

I feel there is a something of a contradiction with this product. This duality makes me feel something is off. It is both being a simple, functional item, but also a bespoke luxury good. A genuinely handcrafted item, that I'm sure is crafted by some skilled artisans who are happy to have the Casio contract, but there still seems something strangely empty to me about it.

Does the lacquer add anything to the usability of the product? I suppose it might have a slightly nicer feel in the hand, but if anything I'd be rather hesitant to use such an expensive item for daily tasks for of fear of damaging it. By way of example, though I'm long past my school days, I regularly use a Casio calculator in the kitchen. It's a convenient device to scale up and down recipe quantities and count calories. I'm hardly going to use an ornate lacquer calculator for such activities.

The situation with the S100X is a good example of an issue I've observed with luxury items more generally.

Let me put it like this: is your Louis Vuitton bag really more useful than a handbag you might find the middle section of Lidl supermarket? Arguably the LV is far less practical.

To be clear, I'm not trying to make some value judgment, saying there is something wrong with purchasing such high end branded merchandise. People can, and should, spend their money as they wish. I'm sure many would regard the things I chose to spend my money on as frivolous.

Additionally, I'm certain that aesthetically, and perhaps in terms of the material quality, that LV bag is superior, and maybe the person who made the LV bag is better compensated than whoever made Lidl bag. And yet the curious lack of satisfaction with the LV bag remains. I very much doubt it offers any greater functionality than the Lidl bag, if anything, as with the lacquer calculator, it is less useful.

A sound system

As noted, not long after this announcement of the S100X, Casio then announced the SXC-1 a portable standalone sampler. Essentially a simplified audio synthesiser that can be used to generate basic audio tracks. Such devices are not new, Teenage Engineering have been producing similar approachable devices for some time now and we should not forget Ableton.

I think what's interesting about this device is how it compares with the high end calculator. The main difference I think is that this one might be its utility. As noted there are several competing devices like this on the market already and I could see in the very least amateurs using this to create tunes. Would it be sufficiently robust to create professional grade music? I'm not sure, I lack the expertise to judge this but perhaps. There are musicians today who purchase old hardware to create distinct sounds.

Where I suppose there might be some a comparison between the two items is the fact the synthesiser is also highly aesthetic and I could also see people buying purely as a collector's item. Even if you never use either device for their intended purpose, they certainly will look good on your shelf.

However I think it's worth dwelling on the utility of this one a bit. Creators often appreciate limitations and can deliberately impose them on themselves. Think about a writer choosing to write everything by hand or on a typewriter, that's a similar move. Perhaps this device's idiosyncrasy could make it stick.

Conclusion

I mentioned that this essay took some inspiration from Yanagi's writing. But in the end, I have gone in something of a different direction. Yanagi felt confident that the objects he described embodied some social reality. While I do agree that the objects we live with, and indeed those I described above, do say something about our world, I am not so confident to derive some ideology from this.

I think it's sufficient to articulate to the reader with some thoughts on what these objects inspired in me, and perhaps the reader has some thoughts on what I've written.

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Objectively Creative: A case of two Casios © 2026 by William Samuel McDonald is licensed under CC BY 4.0

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