Casio’s cheapest real dive watch just got a strap swap. The Duro MDV106C trades the resin band for woven cloth in three colors, keeps the 200-meter rating, and holds the line at $110 on Casio’s US store.
The Duro formula has not moved in years: a big steel case, a unidirectional bezel, a date window, and a marlin on the dial, for the price of a nice dinner. The MDV106C is that formula with fabric where the resin used to be.
The cult around the resin model is well documented. A widely circulated photograph of Bill Gates wearing an MDV106 turned a budget Casio into the most famous cheap watch in the world, and the forums did the rest: teardown threads, strap-swap galleries, and a standing argument that nothing under $500 does the dive-watch brief better. Casio has read those threads. A factory cloth strap is the company selling the swap its own buyers kept making.
Price: $110
Where to Buy: Casio
Three references, one black dial twice
MDV106C-1AV pairs a black dial with a black cloth strap. MDV106C-3AV is the green one, dial and strap both. MDV106C-5AV keeps the black dial and swaps in a beige strap, which is the combination that changes the watch’s character most: the beige fabric pulls the Duro toward a field watch, away from the dive-watch brief it was born with.
The strap is a pass-through cloth band with steel keepers, NATO-style in construction. Cloth dries slower than resin after a swim, and woven fabric breaks in over the first weeks of wear, softening and taking the wrist’s curve the way a canvas belt does.
It also kills the shine: no gloss strap, no resin sheen, just steel and fabric, which suits a 200-meter watch that was always more tool than jewelry. A pass-through strap adds a safety margin: if a spring bar fails, the watch head stays on the other one. It is the configuration the Duro should have shipped with years ago, and the aftermarket’s long head start is the proof.
Small details separate the references beyond color. The seconds hand is red on the black and green models and yellow on the beige, a flash of color against the black dial’s full Arabic numerals. Casio’s US store tags the line NEW 10/2026, a fresh production run rather than a reissue of old stock.
The case, the module, the rating
The case measures 48.5 by 44.2 by 12.1mm, and the lugs turn down hard, so it sits flatter on the wrist than the width promises. Inside is Casio’s module 2784, a three-hand quartz with a date, the same workhorse layout the resin Duro runs. Battery changes are measured in years, accuracy in seconds per month, and there is nothing to wind, charge, or pair.
The bezel is the working part. It turns one way, carries an aluminum insert printed with a 60-minute scale, and exists to track elapsed time: set the triangle at the minute hand when a dive, a boil, or a parking meter starts, and read the minutes off the insert as they pass. Our earlier Duro coverage called it elapsed-time tracking on the bezel, and it remains the feature owners actually use weekly.
Water resistance is 200 meters, printed on the dial as WR 200M, behind a screw-lock crown and a screw-lock case back, under mineral glass.
One clarification worth printing plainly: the Duro is not an ISO-certified Diver’s watch, and never has been. The rating covers swimming, showering, and recreational diving for most wearers, and the watch’s reputation was built by people who used it exactly that hard. Our own coverage of the standard resin Duro made the same point, and the MDV106C changes nothing about it.
Against the resin Duro
The resin-strap Duro remains the cheaper route in. Amazon carries it at $67.88 against its $89.95 list, and it is a different configuration: resin strap, and the dial presentation of the older model.
It anchors the Casio entry in our November dive watch roundup for exactly that reason. The $42 gap to the MDV106C buys the cloth strap, the new references, and the current production run.
At $110 the cloth Duro also steps into a busier bracket than the resin car occupies, against Citizen and Seiko quartz divers and field watches within $20 either way. The Duro’s answer is the one it has always given: 200 meters, a bezel that turns like it should, and nothing on the dial that does not need to be there.
Buy the resin one if the watch is a beater first and a look second. Buy the cloth one if it will live on your wrist daily, because the strap is the part you see and touch most, and it is the part Casio changed.
Price: $110
Where to Buy: Casio
All three references are in stock at Casio’s US store now. The green one will sell first. It always does.
