So I’m getting to that age where in low light, I have trouble reading small print, and if it’s really small, I can’t even read it in normal light. I wear contacts, which makes it even harder - my husband, a glasses-wearer, can at least take his glasses off and generally can read very tiny print. I can’t whip out my contacts on a moment’s notice to read something, so I’m stuck asking him to read things to me or using a magnifying glass which makes me feel like I’m a thousand years old.
I’ve talked to my eye doctor about options in the past, and he was not encouraging as far as contacts go. At least for now, my contacts work great 95% of the time. I was thinking I’d just get a pair of glasses for the times when I am having issues. Plus, I do wear my glasses at night, before going to bed, and the current pair is about a gazillion years old, so I’m ready for a new pair.
Then I see an ad for these nifty multifocal contacts. I plan on asking my doc about them when I go in next month, but was wondering if anyone here has tried 'em out. Or really, any other brand of contacts-for-us-old-people-who-can’t-see-small-print.
A related question: if I do end up with glasses, I was thinking of getting progressive lenses, but I hear that they take some time to get used to. Given that I’m not going to be wearing them full-time, is that a bad idea? Currently if I wear my glasses for an hour a day, that’s a lot.
How the hell are they supposed to work? Multi-focus glasses work because you can move your eyeball relative to the lens, looking through the top, middle, or bottom part of it at will. Obviously that cannot happen with contacts. The web site at your link makes absolutely no attempt to explain how these are supposed to work. I checked the FAQ and even watched the video, but it was just advertising bollocks.
Although the site has a legit look to it, I am not convinced this is not an outright scam. I just don’t see how it would be possible.
I’m in the same boat you are. My answer to the problem was to go to the dollar store and pick up several pair of reading glasses and just wear them with my contacts if I have to see something close-up. I just tried a few pair on and picked the ones that I could see well with.
I have no desire to try any bifocal contacts or to give up my contacts for bifocal glasses. This works perfectly for me and I’ve been doing it for years.
I tried them last year, but decided to go back to regular contacts and reading glasses… however, I have decided this year I am going to my eye doc I would like the option of being able to purchase either regular or the progressive contacts.
They work GREAT for reading and small print. The reason I chose against them is they far more costly and there was a bit of compromise when it came to seeing far off. I noticed this primarily while driving. I could not see things such as road signs quite as clearly in the distance.
As far as staying in place, there is no problem with that at all. They will orientate to your eye ball naturally , I guess they are weighted or something… I just know that wasn’t an issue.
Ideally I would like to have some on hand to use when I drive that are regular contacts, and use the progressive contacts at home when I’m reading/ on the computer a lot. I would say that the higher cost for me was definitely a factor, but as I said, I’m going to talk to the doc and ask why can’t I have the option of purchasing either kind through out the year . It does cost a little bit more for the exam too because it took me about two pair to get to find the right progressives.
I would say if the added cost is not an issue for it, to definitely give it a try! Good luck.
To me, the solution seems obvious. Wear contacts that correct your vision for normal distant viewing, and then carry a pair of reading glasses for close up viewing.
I just got my first prescription glasses about a year ago, at the age of 49. When I was young, I had better-than-normal vision across the entire range, but around 40k, I started noticing difficulty with small detail close up, and began using over-the-counter reading glasses.
Reading glasses are basically bifocals for someone who has good distance vision, but needs correction for close up. You look over them at distant objects, and through them at close objects.
When I got my first pair of glasses, I got a pair of normal bifocals. I was told to expect some difficulty adjusting to them, but I had none at all. I already knew how to use reading glasses, and these were just essentially glasses that corrected my distant vision, with reading glasses built into them through which i could look at close objects.
I then very shortly thereafter learned that my employer would pay for prescription safety glasses, so I took them up on that. These, I got in a progressive, or “no-line bifocal” format. Again, I was told to expect it take some time to getting used to them, and this time, it really did, and I did have significant difficulty with them until I got the hang of them. They work much better for me, now, than the regular bifocals do. The regular bifocals have a sort of a “dead zone” for me, where I have difficulty with some distances that are too close for the main part of the lens, but too far away for the “reading glasses” part of the lens. I can’t use them at my computer, because my computer screen falls into this “dead zone”. Until I got the progressives and became sufficiently used to them, I had to take off my bifocals and put on mild reading glasses at my computer.
By the way, in case you’re wondering why you have more difficulty focusing in lower light, look up depth of field—a concept that I have long been familiar with as a result of my hobbies involving photography and microscopy. In brighter light, your eyes’ irises close down to a smaller size, giving you greater depth of field, and greater margin to accommodate any focusing deficiencies in your eyes. In lower light, they open wider,and you get much less depth of field, requiring your eyes to focus more precisely, and creating greater problems if something is just outside the range to which your eyes can comfortably focus.
Another term to look up is presbyopia. It’s what happens to our eyes when we get old. As a young child, a typical human eye can focus across a range of about 50 diopters. By the age of 25, this is typically down to about 20 diopters, and by age 60, it is typically down to 1 diopter or even half of a diopter.
My far vision is off by about 0.75 of a diopter in both eyes (on the hyperopic or farsighted side). It probably has been so for all of my life, but as long as my eyes had enough focusing range to correct for it, my far vision was fine (in fact, as I said before, better than average).
My cousin had something like these. He was a younger guy, but had a really complicated prescription - apparently his contacts were manufactured in such a way as to be similar to these progressive contacts. They were weighted somehow so that they’d orient themselves correct after he put them in so he could see - if he put them in upside down, they’d naturally move around to reorient themselves.
I don’t know if he had wonky vision until they righted themselves, though. Never thought to ask. Since they weren’t really bifocular, though, I don’t think so. Like I said, he had a weird prescription, and was told many times that he’d never be a candidate for contacts as they’d never be able to manufacture his prescription. Guess they figured it out.
When I started needing reading glasses I wore them on a chain round my neck. Way to look old. :smack: Then I went to the eye doc and got progressive bifocals. Didn’t like wearing glasses all the time. Back to eye doc, she suggested monovision. I wear only one reading contact in one eye. Also I use the dailies so no messy cleaning. Beats the heck out of bifocals, glasses on a chain or surreptitiously pulling the glasses out of my bag to check a menu. YMMV.
in one of my former lives, I built test devices for contact lenses. Multifocal Contact Lenses have five optical zones, concentric, like a target. The odd-spaced ones have one corrective power, and the even-numbered zones have a different optical power. You’d think that this would confusinglty provide two separate images to the eye, one blurry and out-of-focus, the other sharp, and that you couldn’t get useful information out of them. Perhaps, in fact, this is what it does, but the eye/brain can choose which is going to be sharp, evidently, and disregard the fuzzy. at any rate, that’s the claim, and apparently a lot of people seem to think it works, because they sold a lot of them.
I never tried them out myself, so I can’t say. I CAN say that the optical powers were well-defined and what they were supposed to bem to within a quarter of a diopter.
Contact lenses for astigmatism are indeed thicker on the “bottom”, but it’s not the weight difference that orients them properly – it’s the residual friction from blinking. The motion of the eyelids orients them. If you had to rely on the torque due to the weight difference, they’d never orient themselves.
i don’t know if they use the same system for any sort of non-astigmatic contact lenses.
I have regular contacts but my optometrist put me on monovision which is the same idea – correct the dominant eye for distance and the non-dominant for reading and let the brain figure it out. And it does.
I wanted to try multifocal contacts as I have “severe” astigmatism along with moderate myopia and loss of close vision due to age.
I already wear an apparently very complex progressive glasses prescription which I find works really well, but my optometrist told me that he wouldn’t recommend contacts for me as I probably couldn’t even see them, up close OR further away any more, so they would just drive me crazy.
I did wear RGP contacts for a few years, and though I built up quite good tolerance and comfort over time, I found that my vision fluctuated quite a lot.
In the end I felt that contacts created as much of a “Love/hate” relationship as glasses did, and as RGP’s aren’t really designed for part-time wear I gave them up eventually.
Going back to glasses fulltime after a number of years wearing contacts I actually found ironically a revelation, as I had struggled since age 14 to “get along” with glasses.
I just wondered does anyone have the problem that they can’t see their contacts properly to put them in or take them out, and how do you get around this?
For me, once something is far enough away to focus on, it’s already too far and just as blurry. Thank GOD for progressive glasses I say!
I think multifocal contacts are a scam. I have tried for three years to get a fit. I have tried the gas perms and soft. Either you get to see close or see far away. You have to choose. and neither is very crisp. I am a my wits end and ready to give up AGAIN!
I’ve been wearing some kind of aspherical contacts designed for early presbyopia (Cooper Vision Proclear EP if you’re curious) for 3 years now. They’re not the target-style multifocals, but definitely different than the normal spherical contacts.
Anyway, without the contacts, I’m nearsighted with a -2 diopter. So I can see from about 2" out to about 2’ without my glasses just fine, but it gets more blurry after about 2’.
With plain -2 contacts in, I can see fine to about 2", and then it’s blurry. With the EP contacts, I can see at about 1" and outward pretty clearly.
I’m going to find out in 3-4 months about the multifocals though; Cooper is apparently discontinuing the contacts I’ve been wearing, so I’m thinking I’ll just have my optometrist find me a set of in-production lenses and get used to them now.
I have the multifocal lenses which are great for computer work and reading. Distance is uncomfortably blurry,for me. Tried mono vision, and found a better effect, but haven’t kept up with the training on them too frequently. The best compromise are my progressive eyeglasses, which give the crispest vision at any distance. I will probably go back to the mono vision lenses in the summer…hate wearing glasses in the heat