(gun cocks)
- If you kill me, you'll never see
another second of this coming video.
- Why?
- Because I'd be dead.
And then I couldn't finish the video.
(upbeat music)
- Hello! I would like to welcome you
to the Laramy-K Optician Works training center.
Where today, I feel like I owe you an apology.
Progressive lenses have been around
for about 25, almost 30 years now.
And I got to talking with the folks over at IOT,
and their marketing and sales,
and it turns out that there's still a whole lot of
people out there that don't know
a whole lotta things about progressives,
that I kinda assumed that you did.
So today we are going to take a giant step
back and do something I probably
should've done a couple of years ago,
and bring you up to speed on progressive lenses.
Now, you may have noticed our intro there.
And yes, progressive lenses have some good points,
some bad points, and some ugly points too.
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The good.
One of the good things about a progressive lens
is that it almost does it all.
It does have distance, it does have intermediate,
it does have near.
And it works pretty good for all of those things.
So, it kinda, almost does it all.
It is a really great all around lens.
If you have a rather non-demanding day,
it could take you from sun up to bedtime and kinda
fill in everything that you need
through the course of your day.
You know, it's almost down to one pair of glasses,
for a lot of people, certainly not everybody.
But, almost down to one pair of glasses.
It is good for the vanity age, or looks issue.
Look, I'm old, I know I'm old.
I wear a lined bifocal and have since I needed to.
I don't care if somebody knows I'm old.
But I understand that's quite important to a lot of people,
and it does save face for a few years
where you're not digging for the cheaters
or holding your menu out like this trying to read it.
I'm gonna talk next about the bad, and the ugly.
And there's quite a bit of bad,
and quite a bit of ugly that we're gonna cover.
But never forget, that there are quite literally,
billions of people wearing these things.
And that, as an industry, and as an optician for you,
there are billions of dollars that are turned in these.
You know, they work, people use them,
they're just a fine lens, they just have
some issues that you need to know about.
The bad.
Not terrible, not ugly, just the bad.
You know it does a whole lot of things okay.
Yes, it does distance.
Yes, it does intermediate.
Yes, it does near.
But, it doesn't do any of those things perfect.
It just does them pretty good.
Good, sometimes even almost great, but never quite there.
They require, absolutely, positively must
require head and eye movement.
Now you may not think that's a really big thing,
but imagine, if you need to move your head,
to see whatever it is that you're looking at clearly,
and you have to hold it there for any length of time,
well, that could get kinda old
and you might look kind of odd.
So just remember that they always require head movement.
They also require a little bit
of eye movement within the lens.
'Cause you can't always turn your head
to point your nose at what you want to look at.
Sometimes there's a little moving around,
which is just natural,
especially for a little peripheral vision.
And even if you have the most mild of phoria,
where one eye doesn't move quite in sync with the other,
it can be a little bit of a problem.
They're bad at any, and I mean any long-term task.
If you drive for a living, 8, 9, 10 hours a day
or sales rep or something, you're gonna
want a pair of single vision distance glasses.
Probably suns and clears.
Progressives just aren't perfect
for that long-term single use focus.
Me, you know I read a couple of hours every night.
Progressives aren't gonna do it.
Gonna need that second pair.
So you're almost, kinda down to one pair throughout your day
but when it's hobby time or anytime you need
to spend more than an hour or so at something,
you're going to want a specific pair for that.
The ugly (chuckles)
and this is really pretty ugly.
A progressive lens will always have
that marginal astigmatism.
It will always have that blur out to the sides.
Can't get around it.
As add power goes up from 1 to 1.50 to 2 to 2.50 to 3,
as add power increases distortion throughout
the entire lens, not just in the add portion, goes up.
Mathematical, scientific, physics guaranteed relationship.
Nothing we can do about it.
As power goes up in astigmatism or both goes up,
so does distortion where?
Across the entire lens.
This is what we're going to look at
a little bit closer and I'm going to show you
a little bit more about how a progressive lens is set up.
I'm going to erase the board,
I will see you back in just a minute.
We're going to look at the lens in two different ways.
We're going to look at it from a profile position
and then I'm going to turn the lens
so it's facing you and we'll dig into it a little bit more.
The idea behind a progressive lens.
And I want to take a side step here
and say, like so many things in life,
until you're experiencing it for yourself
you can't imagine what it's like.
So for all you youngin's out there,
everybody who's under 40 or so,
this is a little hard to grasp,
but do your best to try so that you can
sell progressives because you make a whole lot
of money with them and of course,
most people need them.
The lens itself, for distance,
could be any power.
It could be minus, it could be plus,
it could be astigmatism, it could have cylinder.
Any powers at all that a distance
lens power would be written for.
The idea behind the lens,
level headed looking out through the distance lens power,
off into the distance infinity,
anything out past 20 feet you can see clearly.
Just as you would with a single
vision pair of distance glasses.
You can see the tree, you can see across the canyon,
you can see the street sign down the road.
If I move my head, hence through the lens,
I change position and I go down into this intermediate,
what they call corridor,
I move the object itself or I move my body a little bit,
I will have a focus for things that are in
my intermediate distance length.
That would be anything from 20 feet to my
nearest possible accommodation point.
And that's going to depend on the person,
and the add power.
For intermediate, we generally think of computer distance.
There's my laptop.
You might be watching me on YouTube.
There I am.
It's my intermediate zone.
That is a range of focus.
Now because you are an optician,
you also of course need to work on those little tiny things
so in addition you have your near full power.
That's your distance power combined with your full add power
whatever that might be, 1, 1.25, 1.50, 1.75,
and you can see the head of your screwdriver
to put it in that little tiny slot
on that little tiny screw on a pair of eyeglasses.
It's a concept of a progressive lens,
distance, a building of power in intermediate,
to the full near which includes
your full add power.
Next, I'm going to turn this lens,
so we're gonna look at it straight on,
and talk a little bit about that corridor
that I just mentioned.
Progressive lenses, the good, the bad and the ugly.
The hard versus soft designs,
hard versus soft is crazy super dated,
but you still see it popping up on social media.
You still people asking the question
what is the difference between the two
and you still see it on tests.
So let's talk about that for just a second.
I went out and I asked some other folks,
we worked it out so this is kind of vetted
and this is what we came up with.
A hard design.
The corridor in the areas of the usable lens
can be slightly wider and enlarged.
So your black lines here,
that would be a hard design.
But the transition from clear to the marginal astigmatism,
the optical swamp and the land of optical garbage,
the distortion in the peripheral area
is abrupt and harsh.
Once your eye wanders from this clear zone into these areas,
it's a very clear place, like a slap in the face,
it was very disorienting for people to wear.
A soft design.
The corridor in the areas of the usable lens
may be slightly narrower or restricted,
the blue lines.
A little bit narrow, a little less room to work.
But the transition from clear to the marginal astigmatism
in the outside areas, distortion in the peripheral area
is much smoother and hence, it is easier to wear.
Now there used to be two very distinct designs,
that's not the case anymore.
All modern designs, all freeform
are a combination of the two,
but that is where hard design and soft design comes from.
Inherent in progressive design is
that the distance is, and I put always in brackets,
because who knows somebody may be turned to
freeform upside down once or something,
it's always the largest area just represented here.
This is a big large viewing area,
you have some good peripheral vision,
you can look up, around.
This is fairly all clear, it's a good size area.
Intermediate always narrows,
slightly widening down towards your near.
You will hear progressives also called
Progressive Addition Lenses or PAL's.
You still see that in magazines.
You'll still see that stuff online.
Where does it come from?
It's the concept that it is a progression of power.
You have your distance, intermediate and near.
If you look at that drawing,
that's the concept for a progressive lens.
If I have a distance power of +2 OU and an add of a +1.50,
the corridor, or the area between the distance and full add
or the near, will build or progress in power smoothly.
Not in actual steps.
Way too much to get into here today,
but the idea that this is smooth,
that this builds without perfect diopter steps,
that's actually where this stuff comes from.
What I'd really like to get across today
is the difference in the rate of change
in progressive lens design.
That's kind of the concept behind
this entire video presentation.
And this would be my own interpretation as a graph,
we start it off by 25, 30 years ago.
Technology built, changes were created,
we had the Varilux Comfort introduced,
some where in here, great lens,
probably took the market for a good 10 years
as clearly the best there was.
Then we came along with Freeform,
everybody else caught up and now we're still developing,
we still have research and development stuff,
we have changes but those changes are not
quite as dramatic, they aren't quite the leaps
and bounds in the technology and differences
that they once were.
And yes we are probably tapering back off
to about as good as we're going to get.
Now if we don't have super crazy leaps and bounds,
we have this slow changes in development.
Why do these tweaks matter?
Why does these little tiny subtle changes,
why do they matter?
Why does quality matter?
Why do you want folks like IOT designing the lenses
and a lab like Laramy-K making them?
Well, I would say it's because your
job is tough enough already.
As we age, let's say that you've
seen a customer when they were 50, 55 and 60.
When they first came to you at 50,
they had a nice low 1.50 add,
distance of a -2.50, with a little tiny cyl or something,
and they were in pretty good health.
They were active and happy.
Life was good and they still had kids at home,
and then you saw them at 55 and their add power
went up a little tiny bit, they're getting older,
they're getting slower, things aren't working quite so well,
their distance didn't change at all,
put them in the exact same lens
and their vision's just not quite as good.
Five years goes by, you see them again when they're 60,
65, whatever it might be.
Their add power is now up to a 2 or 2.50,
rest of their body is falling apart,
things don't work like they used to, nothing does.
And their add power went up, distance power
stayed the same, they put on the pair of glasses,
nothing else in life works too good,
and now neither do their glasses.
Why?
Because as power goes up,
say it with me, so does distortion throughout the lens.
So your job is tough enough already,
it's these little tiny tweaks,
it's the quality that matters,
it's the lens design that matters.
It means choosing the best lens
for your individual customer.
It's going to keep them happy
as you work with them through the years.
Progressive markings, marking up a lens
in order to do verification layout or finishing work,
how to finish them and choosing the proper
freeform lens design for your customer
which is an awesome video I did with Janet a few months ago.
That stuff is all on the YouTube channel
and or on the website opticianworks.com.
Whew!
I think we are through with this,
I talked about all these things that are wrong,
the good, the bad, the ugly,
and next time we are going to talk about
office specific progressive lenses,
which actually overcome a lot of the bad and the ugly.
I will see you again next week.
We're going to look at this lens in two different ways.
First we're going to look at it as a profile,
and then we're going to look on it...(sigh)
look on it?
Yeah, really.