[sshanky]

I recently got a few pairs of glasses from the most common optical retailer with their best lenses (Ray Ban Rox Plus in sunglasses and BlueIQ in the regular ones). I have a light single vision prescription (about -1.5 sphere and -1 cyl in each eye) but still, I find these are not very good lenses -- I see plenty of chromatic aberration on the sides (I guess they're both made from polycarbonate where I'm more used to getting CR39 plastic) and they both appear to have other abberrations in the plastic that I can see when I pass different parts of the lens in front of my eye.

As a photographer, I'm really interested in having excellent optics in front of my eyes, but I don't know how to achieve it. I agree with the comments above -- it's sucky that you have to make full .25 incremental jumps, and that the axis for astigmatism is still determined by me having to say "1" looks better than "2" and "3" looks better than "4", all done with antiquated equipment manually operated when it should all be readable right off the retina.

Couple this with high pressure salesmanship and no transparency at all about the lenses and it is obvious why it's so hard for the consumer to get this right.

Yesterday I learned that Sam's Club offers Nikon, Zeiss and Seiko lenses. Some of my favorite glasses I got in Japan for $80 and they included standard Seikos with UV protection and great AR coating.

[no_identd]

Sorry for the late reply. Chromatic aberrations primarily originate from glasses with a low Abbe number, which ROUGHLY (_but not strictly!_ RARE [and expensive] exceptions exist!) correlates with glasses with a high refractive index. Get glasses with a high Abbe number (which you'll likely find in glasses with a low refractive index) and the chromatic ab(b)errations will disappear. The price you have to pay: They'll end up heavier. But only slightly, thanks to modern organic glass polymers whose surface we, via surface treatment, can make harder than mineralic glass nowadays. A capability that has only appeared in the last few years.

As for the rest, the advice given in the other reply to your comment seems sound.

[walterbell]

Try a digitally surfaced Zeiss single vision lens in Trivex. It can be made in 0.01D increments. Visit a local university for your eye exam, they're probably not trying to sell you lenses. Seiko has good products but were bought by Hoya and have been going through many internal changes.

https://www.personalizedvision.com/zeisssinglevisionhd