The Luxury Rolex Watch Alternative That's Under $70 And Nearly Identical

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A good way to tell if your old watch is worth anything is to find out if it is an authentic Rolex. If it is, it is a watch brand that could be valued for a ton of money. For example, a Rolex Submariner wristwatch made between the 1950s and 1970s could cost anywhere from $1,500 to more than $600,000, according to jewelry and watch dealer Luxury Time NYC.

That is not to say a Rolex Submariner made in the 21^st Century is cheap. Bob's Watches, an online dealer of certified Rolex watches, has Rolex Submariners made since 2010 listed for sale between $9,595 and $34,955. After all, the new Rolex Submariner models are a continuation and modernization of a water-resistant dive watch that, when it debuted in 1953, was the first to be able to withstand the pressure of being submerged more than 100 meters, or 330 feet, beneath the waves. But there are new watch brands out there with a similar look and functionality of a Rolex Submariner that do not cost anywhere near as much. One example of an alternative watch that looks almost like a luxury Rolex Submariner is the Seiko Prospex SPB143, which sells for around $1,200.

Yet a far cheaper brand of watch that looks almost identical to a Rolex Submariner is the Casio Duro MDV 106, which be obtained at Casio.com for $69.95 or for just over $52 at Amazon.com.

The Casio Duro is listed by watch dealer and blog TeddyBaldassarre.com as one of 21 best budget alternatives. Men's Jewelry website Cladright listed the Casio Durio as one of 15 watches that "look just like a Casio Submariner." And WatchGecko, a YouTube channel that reviews watches, described the Casio Marlin Durio MDV 106 a "highly capable dive watch" that looks a lot like a Rolex Submariner. Among the similar features of both watches is a unidirectional rotating bezel that helps divers keep track of time and a clear time display that illuminates in the dark.

Still, the Casio Duro is not a Rolex clone. The Rolex Submariner ranges in size between 40 and 41 millimeters of stainless steel. Later submariner models are capable of withstanding 300 meters of pressure, or 1,000 feet, per a Rolex Submariner webpage. And like most Rolexes, the Submariner is a mechanical watch.

The Casio Duro, on the other hand, has a steel metal casing between 38.5 and 44 millimeters thick, depending on the model. Casio came out with 38.5-millimeter-thick watches (the MDV-10) in 2023 because some potential customers complained that the 44 mm watches were just too big, per TeddyBaldassarre.com. Those lighter models, though, could barely withstand 50 meters of water depth. The heavier 44 mm, MDV-106, on the other hand, can withstand a depth of 200 meters, or 660 feet. In addition, the MDV-106 is often referred to as a "Casio Marlin" because it has a Marlin fish on its display and engraved on its back, a feature that the Rolex Submariner, and the later model Duro MDV-107, do not have.

Finally, Casio Duro watches are quartz movement watches, meaning they are powered by quartz, a feature that makes them far cheaper to make, more energy efficient and keep more accurate time than a mechanical watch. The invention of quartz wristwatches in the 1970s ushered in the so-called Quartz Crisis for Swiss mechanical watch makers like Rolex. In that decade, the value of Rolex Submariners plummeted, according to Bob's Watches. Those prices recovered in the 1980s, Bob's Watches added, but only after Rolex and other mechanical watch brands were fully embraces as luxury items.

Meanwhile, Casio, a Japanese multinational electronics company, came out with its first quartz powered watch, the Casiotron, in 1974, per clothing and attire blog Habilitate. By the 1980s, Casio embarked on building its first durable, shock absorbent watch brand, the G-Shock. By the 1990s, Casio was producing its own water-resistant diver watches, the Frogman DW-6300 and the titanium model Frogman DW-8200.

It was not until 2011 that Casio came out with the Casio Duro. Within its first decade more than 600,000 units had been sold. And the buyers were not just people who could not afford a Submariner. Multibillionaire Bill Gates, a fan of Casio watches, sported a Marlin MDV-106 during a talk at Harvard in 2018, tech news website Xataha On reported.