The concept is sweet: eyeglasses with an adjustment wheel, so you can dial from reading glasses to computer glasses to driving glasses. And the price has certainly come down: when I first heard of the idea, the price was around $500. Now it’s less…
But…
Are they any darn good? The price is so low, that, paradoxically, I’m dubious whether they’re worth anything. Would I be just as well off getting “grocery store” eyeglasses?
Anybody tried these?
They sound great for people who live in the bush and can’t get eye care. That’s about it. They’re still single-focus lenses, so if you’re driving and have them adjusted to see the road, you won’t be able to see the dashboard.
As a progressive lens wearer, these would be a huge hassle for me. Huge. I suppose for just reading glasses, with the idea that you will need greater power over time, they could be a one-and-done kind of thing since you can increase reading power as needed over the years. But for reading glasses, they’re expensive and can be gotten in multiples for the same price from the drug store.
From the two instructional videos I watched, they really give me the impression they’re meant for either people who only need them intermittently (which seems like a bad idea for distance, not correcting distance makes the focusing muscles lazy and harder to correct over time), or for people in third world countries who don’t have access to regular eye care.
Plus, they are pretty much the dorkiest glasses anyone could possibly wear. I’m really surprised the hipsters haven’t gotten a hold of these.
Grin! I’m the sort of person who wears dorky glasses, so that’d be okay.
I’ve tried progressives – and old-fashioned bifocals – and didn’t care for 'em. I had to crane my neck WAY back to read. Incredibly uncomfortable. These days, I have to ride herd on three different sets of glasses.
But…these make me think they might be worse than just dorky, and not usable at all. For one thing, they wouldn’t have astigmatism correction, right, just straight magnification?
Yes, one of the videos mentioned they don’t correct astigmatism.
It’s too bad the progressives didn’t work for you. I read through a couple of threads here before committing to them, they cost 3-4x what my single visions did, but they’re through Zenni so that means they’re still only $100. Reading the threads here, they weren’t going to work if I didn’t get them fitted exactly to my face and how the frames fit my face, blah blah. I took the “risk” as far as that goes with the low relative expense and returnability, and I like them a lot better than I thought! Not any crazy head tilting. The fields for each part of vision seem to work just fine. It did take a couple weeks to get used to them to the point where I don’t notice them any more, and a little longer to get used to stairs. My reading adjustment is only +1.5 though, so people saying they couldn’t get used to them with really strong near power I completely understand now! It’s nice not to have to try to look under my frames, or lift them to read.
Those Adlens things are cheap enough now, maybe you would get some use for them around the house between reading and computer, maybe with one lens for medium distance and one for close. But only if you really want your dork flag to fly!
Personally, I’ve been wearing standard lined bifocals for about 30 years, and it only took a day or two to get used to them. I don’t understand how people have gotten so spoiled and unstoic that they can’t be bothered with the most trivial inconvenience without a threads-worth of whining about it.
Bifocals with lined transition cost about 25 bucks at Zenni. Order a bunch of them and get on with your life.
ETA: if they allow you to see into the future or through brick walls, maybe.
Grin! I like that!
(When I’m out in the world, with my driving glasses, I can hardly read at all. I end up taking my glasses off, closing one eye, and using one of the lenses as a magnifying glass. It’s absurd…but, hey, it does work.)
ETA: ah, not while driving, to be sure!
This is a warning for you. You’ve made a couple of these types of replies recently and this is one of the more jerkish ones, so knock it off. You don’t have to reply to a topic if you don’t have anything helpful to add other than threadshitting.
I have tried a pair. My uncle spent some ridiculous amount on a pair with metal frames and an adjustment slide at the top. Trouble was, they were perfectly round - which I don’t like - and they looked a bit steam punk - which again, is not my style.
Functionally, they did work well. I only need glasses for reading, working on the computer and sometimes when I’m cooking. For those activities, I keep two sets of reading glasses, one a little more powerful than the other. So adjustable ones might potentially eliminate the need for switching from one to the other. But as I typically do those things in separate parts of the house, the cooking glasses stay in the kitchen and the reading ones on my night stand and office. So not a huge logistics issue and I doubt I’d bother buying the high end version. The cheap ones with the heavy plastic frames are just to ugly to consider.
If I remember correctly, those early models involved pressurized oil bladders, and you’d pump the oil to higher pressures to change the shape of the bladders.
Is this the technology Adlens uses? I can’t tell from the picture; I thought it was a two-element lens, with one element moving closer or farther from the other, rather like changing the focus on an old-fashioned naval telescope.
For use in the house, I can cope with ugly! Even to slip on while reading, say, on the bus or in a doctor’s waiting room, ugly isn’t too awful. Low prices will compensate (for some of us!) for a whole lot of pride!
They look like something Thomas Dolby might wear.
Holy crap, they are cheap!
They use both a fluid technology and a moving lens system.
https://www.adlens.com/our-technology/
The moving lenses are polycarbonate. I had enough trouble seeing with single focus polycarbonate that I have no interest in those. But it might be fun to test-drive the other ones.
…or Cyclops from an X-men comic book.
Granted, if she could shrink down the laser naval weapons system mentioned a few threads up into eyeglass frame size, could you imagine the fun she could have…? :smack:
