I didn’t adjust to them for 10 years and when they started talking about trifocals I did the lazic surgery thing and glad I did.
This is a really good thread, and I registered just to post here. I just got my 1st progressives, and I did make the “mistake” of ordering them online. GlassesUSA. With that said, I’ve been wearing them for about 2 days, and I already have the tweaks in mind to “fix” them.
First, I’m -8.75 R, -7 L. And now a -2.5 for the reading part. I’ve had presbyopia for years, but I’ve just been doing the “take the glasses off to read”, or read at arms length. (My last pair was a “compromise” prescription, to lose some distance by retaining some ability to see close up.) But now I have an eye test at the DMV coming up, and that pair probably won’t work.
I did rush getting them online, so I could have a useful pair to pass the DMV test. And I’m a little lazy too. But one fix is to go to a local place, and point out the issues I have with this pair.
The biggest problem with the online pair, is that I think the optical centers are a little too high. I’d rather have the full half of the upper lens for distance, and smaller parts for computer correction, and for reading. Fix #2 is that I will probably go -1.5 for the near correction too. That should help widen up the reading part too. And I’ll still be better off for close up sight, than I was with the “compromise” pair.
I view it this way: I’ve been primarily concerned with distance anyway, and when I’ve really needed to read, I’ve just taken them off. So getting that reading ability back in one pair, is just gravy. But I don’t want to lose the distance part.
There are a few comments in here that I’m intrigued by: that some people prefer bifocals, because it gives them larger areas for distance and for reading, just no area for computer screen usage. I’m still thinking about that as an option.
This might be an old thread, but it’s still all relevant today.
One thing I don’t understand though. We’ve all seen the typical pictures of a progressive lens. Here is an example:
You can make a single vision lens of the distance part. You can make a single vision lens of the reading part. But why can’t for a typical progressive lens, the reading part extend all the way out to the edge of the lens? And same for the intermediate part: why doesn’t that intermediate part extend all the way out to the edge of the lens? Seems to me that if you did that, you’d remove a lot of the peripheral effects that people complain about.
It’s just not physically possible. The power of a lens comes from curvatures. To have multiple powers in one lens requires either a ridge in a straight line or intermediate curves to smooth out those lines. To make a progressive lens there has to be distortion somewhere, so it’s placed in the parts of the lens that people normally don’t look through anyway. As an optician, I occasionally came across people who didn’t know there was distortion in the periphery (usually because they weren’t paying attention when it was explained how they worked) and didn’t notice it until it was pointed out to them.