I’ve been wearing glasses since I was 10, and I put my glasses on before I even get out of bed. When I hit 50, I ended up getting two pairs of progressive lenses. One pair for driving and watching television/movies, which I wear most of the time, and another pair for computer work.
I am currently wearing my daily glasses, which work for reading because my laptop is in my lap, so I hit the sweet spot for reading rather easily. This also works for my ebook and tablet.
For my phone, I can use no glasses, my daily glasses or my computer glasses.
But for a computer monitor, I have to have my computer glasses. I really have problems reading.
Once I forgot to change glasses and wore my computer glasses when my husband was driving. That did not go over well, and I got a headache from trying to focus on distant items, which doesn’t work with computer glasses.
Hubby doesn’t need glasses for walking around, and rarely wears them. He needs them for driving and for working with a computer monitor, so he got progressives for both. He ended up switching his driving glasses back to single focus as he he felt the reading part of the lens interfered too much with his distance vision.
If you don’t need glasses to see distance, you probably aren’t in the market for expensive progressive lenses. My husband keeps cheap readers all over the house. I have expensive progressive lenses. My corrected vision is better than his, but that’s not why i pay $900 for glasses, i do it because before i got them i was juggling 3 pairs of $300 glasses.
Probably. But mine are glass, and i don’t know the manufacturer.
And mine are more like -7.5, -5.5. i don’t have the 4 point swing you have. That may make progressives more challenging.
Progressive lenses made me constantly swing my head to find the focus. I felt I looked like a chicken. One thing, and only one thing, was in focus.
The glasses went back in a day. I told the glasses guy he made me feel like I was in a funhouse, everything was blurred except tor the exact center. I made him feel real bad about saying, “You’ll get used to them.” I told him to go buy underwear three or four sizes too small. “You’ll get used to them.”
And for driving, that was a laugh.
It was lined bifocals for me, until cataract surgery a few weeks ago. Now I have one near and one far, like my contacts were when I wore them years ago. I love my new vision.
I have progressives and they don’t bother me at all. It did take a couple of tries to get the alignment right though.
However …
I am so, so nearsighted and astigmatic that I think I’m used to a lot of my world being out of sharp focus. As I sit and type this on a desktop computer, the words I’m typing are crisp enough, but if I keep my head still and glance at the icons next to the page they are slightly fuzzy. Not unreadable, but definitely not in focus. I don’t care. My sight is such that to read the fine print on some product labels I take my glasses off and hold the item an inch from my nose. THAT’s when my vision is the best
I’m reading this thread on my phone, without my glasses, and with the phone 6 or 8 inches from my eyes.
Yeah, I’m very nearsighted and haven’t had good peripheral vision in decades. But the original progressives i tried drove me nuts. The distortions gave me headaches, and i couldn’t find people i know in crowds because my peripheral vision was vastly worse than with single vision lenses. The expensive progressives give me distance vision that’s nearly as good as i got with single vision lenses, so long as i use the top of the lens to peer out of.
A vote for progressives for everything other than reading on paper.
For whatever reason, my progressives work fine for what I do on a computer screen. Yes, the far edges are blurry unless I move my head; but the clear range within which I can just use my eyes, at the distance from which I see the screen, is fairly wide. I think I’ve adjusted to automatically making height adjustments with my head, and just using my eyes horizontally; it only took me a few days, years ago.
And I routinely do work in which I need to be able to see things at a wide variety of distances. Bifocals didn’t work for me at all, and carrying multiple pairs of glasses around with me, and in addition not getting them all damaged, isn’t possible.
– the other thing the progressives aren’t good for is looking at the night sky. Lots of distortion at that distance, unless the angle of my head is perfect for the specific spot I’m looking at, which is often difficult to manage. But I never got much beyond the ‘wow that’s pretty’ stage of that anyway; and it’s still pretty, just odd.
– it occurs to me that I’m not sure what type of progressives I have. They also correct for fairly severe nearsightedness, astigmatism, and for the last somewhere-over-20-years for farsightedness.
Agreeing with this. One day is way too soon to tell.
How does he manage to read the dashboard gauges?
– maybe my correction for distance vision is a lot more drastic than his.
It depends how much accommodation your eyes can do. That gets less as we age but doesn’t totally go away. I could read the gauges fine with single vision glasses. I couldn’t read close stuff, like a book or computer screen or phone, but the gauges were far enough away to be okay.
He never wears glasses for reading a book/tablet or for walking around and his distance glasses are much thinner than mine.
I’ll do this as well, but I use the laptop for posting, so I’m currently wearing my walking around / driving / tv / movie glasses.
I have a three day weekend so I even took my computer glasses and badge for work out of my purse. I rarely use my computer glasses at home, unless I’m doing taxes.
Well, after using these for a few days, I think they will be relegated to the car. They are useless around the house. I can’t use them with my computer or iPad, and even on my home theater screen only the top half is clear and the bottom half of the image blurry.
What I was trying to eliminate was the collection of reading glasses I leave all over the place, and constantly having to look for my regular glasses because I absent-mindedly took them off to read something and can’t remember where they are. These progressives don’t solve that problem at all, because I still need to wear reading glasses if I want to do a long session of reading. Progressives are okay for reading a menu or a package label, but I would not want to read a novel with them.
The killer use case for them will be shopping. I’ll be able to read labels on food without switching glasses. As general purpose going-out glasses, I’ll get used to them. Restaurants as well - I’ll be able to read a menu without changing glasses. But that’s about it. If I’m driving more than a half hour or so I’d switch to my regular glasses for better peripheral vision…
If I had known that’s all they’d be good for, I wouldn’t have purchased them, or I would have gotten a cheaper pair. But now that I have them, I’ll try to make the best of it.
Oh, I think we are talking about two different things. Are you talking about the difference between your two eyes? A measurement with a - in front is for myopia, a + measurement is presbyopia. So I have -1.75 correction for distance, and my reading correction is +2.25. My eyes are actually the same, both -1.75 for distance and +2.25 for near focus.
The price of aging. I just turned 60, and from now on in it’s patch, patch, patch until you die…
My distance correction is something like -7.5, and both eyes are close to each other. My progressive lenses have less correction for distance on the bottom of the lenses. The adjustment, from the top to the bottom of the lens, is 2.5 diopters. (It’s etched right into the glasses, very faintly.) So the “reading” portion of my progressive lenses has a correction of about -5. Because I’m extremely nearsighted, and while i can read micro-print on currency if i hold the bill close enough to my eye, i can’t read a newspaper without a distance adjustment, it’s too far away.
I think the amount of distortion is greater as that adjustment gets bigger.
Also, while the top of my glasses corrects for “infinity”, i have that part positioned a little higher than the part i routinely look out of. The middle of the lens is more like -6.5 than the -7.5 i need to read road signs. So it’s comfortable for reading a computer or a newspaper. And it’s good enough for walking around. But i slide my glasses down my nose and look through the top when i drive, and at a movie theater.
My bifocals work great for driving, the line break is right at the top of the dashboard, so the far vision is above and the close vision is the speedo. I can use them at the computer, but I end up with my head tilted back and using the low part of the lenses. I’ve got single visions that work just fine for the computer and just leave a pair at each computer.
The bifocals are needed in the shop where I need to see 1/16’ths on my tape measure.
Until I needed multifocals, the only time since I got in the habit when I was six that my glasses were off my face when I was awake was when I was washing my face or in the bath. Now they’re off while I’m reading on paper, and might stay off long enough for me to walk across the room for something if I’m going to go back to reading.
I can see well enough not to bang into things, so I can reasonably safely walk around (but absolutely not drive) without them, though in poor light it may be hard to identify what I might be about to step on. (I sometimes walk into things anyway, but that’s being a klutz, not being unable to see them.) But pretty much everything more than a couple of feet from my face has been blurry (without glasses) for pretty much all of my life. The point of clear vision without glasses, between that and the farsightedness, is now down to a range of about 3 to 7 inches from my face. I hope it doesn’t narrow much further; but my prescription now barely changes, if at all, from year to year, so maybe it won’t.
I often have to take mine off, and hold the label within that 3" - 7" range. Theoretically I can read very small print with the progressives on, and I can often do it, with concentration, at the eye doctor’s office – but it’s easier without the glasses.
-3.5 in the right eye, -5.25 in the left; +2.75 in both eyes.
My eyes are very different. Before I got the bifocals, I’d take my glasses off and use the worse eye’s lens with the better eye as a magnifier to read the tiny text on groceries.
Side note, why is the text so small on food packaging?
I think, because they’re required to put a whole batch of stuff on there, but they don’t think the label looks good if much of it is a wall of print; so they shrink the print down so the front of the label can look attractive. Or what they think is attractive, anyway.
What really annoys me is that the ingredients list is often in even smaller print than the nutrients; and I’m usually more interested in the ingredients list than in the nutrients list. Hey, guys, yes I figure that your All Whole Grains whatever has fiber in it – what I’m trying to find out is, is there flax in here? (The answer to which is usually yes, these days. Bah grumble.)
And don’t get me started either on dates, not to mention control buttons and opening indicators, in effectively the same color as the background.
I love my progressives and have from the day I got them as my first pair of glasses ever. They are not great for my two large monitors at my desk, so I have a pair of single vision glasses optimized for the exact distance to my screen.
I don’t have any problem reading; paper books, my kindle and my iPad are all fine because I tend to hold those lower. More or less lap level.
If I do find myself using my progressives while at my computer, it’s doable, but I’m sure I look weird, peering up and down all the time. Where my progressives really fail me is when I’m either working on a car or similar, or doing things like electrical or plumbing work around the house. Situations where my work is close up and above my head, or where my ability to move my head to see is limited. I get super frustrated, but it’s uncommon enough that it’s only a minor hiccup.
The bummer about progressives is that now sunglasses are brutally expensive. I have to treat them with so much more respect than I was used to.
My optometrist once told me about the better corridor width that came with more expensive, premium progressive lenses and I was skeptical. I went and got a Costco pair of their less expensive, supposed top end digital lenses and I HATED them. Some of the negative comments I read in this thread suggest to me that the naysayers might actually be happy with a better lens.
It’s interesting how people’s perception perception can be so different. I started from pretty much the same place as you, and after an initial adjustment period, found the progressives to be great.
My distance vision does not need correction, so my progressives are 0/+2.25, which might be part of why we arrived someplace different.
When my reading correction was only +1.50, I could survive with readers, because I could still get by without them when necessary, and I could still read my phone well enough. After a couple of years that wasn’t good enough, so I had the choice of carrying +2.25 readers everywhere, or getting progressives, which are really just reading glasses I store on my face.
Additionally, I really hated the +2.25 readers. I find the focus is only at a single and precise distance from my eyes, so I can’t move around and change the focus like I can with progressives.
This was also one of the big motivators. I couldn’t read labels anymore. It’s a big pain to have to use the magnifier on my phone to read ingredients.
As for cost, I do recommend Zenni. I got their most expensive class of frames, the premium progressive layout, and trivex lenses (higher optical clarity than polycarbonate, and shatter resistant/safety) for $100. At the age where presbyopia has kicked in, I’m also happy wearing Zenni’s $5 clip on sunglasses that go over my progressives for those times where I want sun and reading at the same time. In the car I still can get by with uncorrected sunglasses or nothing at all at night.
@echoreply , my experience is almost identical to yours. And I find the differences in people’s experiences fascinating too. I really wonder about what the cause is.
I got progressives for the same reason. I started out with no Rx on top – it’s called plano – and +1.50 or so. I couldn’t stand putting on and taking off reading glasses all the time. It felt ridiculous, and I was not going to do the looking over the top thing, so I got progressives. I loved them immediately.
Now a have a very minor farsightedness and astigmatism correction on top (+.50), and +2.75 for close up. My single vision reading glasses, for reading in bed, are +3.25.
I gave to guess based on word shape which is the shampoo bottle and which is conditioner in the shower. It freaks me out sometimes that I really can’t read some really important things, like medication bottles, without glasses now.
But I still love my progressives. I wear them all the time. In the office I wear ones that are set up differently, and I love those too.
Maybe the key for me was starting at such a low Rx allowed my brain to get used to finding the in-focus area, before there was such a big difference.
I also think, if you paid a bunch of money for really good progressives, it worth taking them back to make sure they match your Rx. I wound up with messed up lenses once, and I very quickly realized something was wrong – they were awful.
I believe people when they say they hate their progressives, and I’m also really glad that that’s not me.
Another progressive hater. I do crosswords and such. Moving my head constantly to look at clues and parts of the grid. And the side vision while driving was a mess.
So, bifocals for reading or driving/watching TV/etc.
For computer work I got an intermediate monofocal pair. I have a really large screen set back a bit so an Rx halfway between reading and distance is fine.
