As a related aside - I got lasik surgery a couple years ago for $3000 on the dot and it was easily in the top best life decisions I’ve ever made. Most lasik practices I know of have low-no interest financing options that are going to be cheaper long term than glasses.
Why are glasses so expensive? The eyewear industry prefers to keep that blurry
471–480 of 610 posts
Re: Why are glasses so expensive? The eyewear industry prefers to keep that blurry
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
However, you can easily measure your own pupillary distance exactly down to the millimeter with a ruler and a mirror. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13092902
Only problem is, if you look to close in the mirror, your pd changes because your eyes rotate to focus on the shorter distance. If you are closer then 1 meter to the mirror you should compensate. Up to 2,5 mm per eye if ur at 40 cm distance.(20cm from mirror)
There is no such problem. Each eye stares at itself in the mirror. (Not necessarily at the same time, if the procedure is done as described.) Those two lines of sight are parallel if the mirror is true, regardless of distance to the mirror.
There may be a different problem: though parallel, those two lines of sight may not be exactly perpendicular to the ruler/mirror. This is not going to make a huge difference.
Suppose the mirror/ruler is rotated five degrees off relative to the plane of your pupils, which is quite a lot. For an pupillary distance of 65 mm, this introduces only a 0.25 mm error on the low side: basically the measurement shrinks by the cosine of 5 degrees which is 0.996.
Pupillary distances are typically given to the millimeter.
> If you are closer then 1 meter to the mirror you should compensate.
If you're 1 meter away from the mirror, you won't be able to read the ruler, at least if you're doing all this because of near-sightedness. :) This technique is best if your face is right up to the mirror. If you press your forehead to the mirror so your head doesn't move, that's probably best. If you're far sighted and can't read the ruler from that close, then you have to back off. If you can't read the ruler at any distance, you may have to do this with contact lenses on.
Re: Why are glasses so expensive? The eyewear industry prefers to keep that blurry
#473new to hacker news, so why are we discussion glasses here...confused...
Re: Why are glasses so expensive? The eyewear industry prefers to keep that blurry
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want to like Zenni, and I have ordered from them, but I am frustrated every time. I have a very, very large head. I need glasses at least 155mm wide, if not 165mm wide to fit around my temples. Yet finding data on the width of their frames is next to impossible. Even their sales people I reach via chat do not have the data. Sometimes I will see frames with some measurements, but not all, and its just inconsistent.…
I just wanted to chime in here because while I don't have a wide head, I have a long distance between my ears and my nose (i.e., narrow but long from front to back). It literally took me 40 years to figure out that if the arms of the glasses are not long enough, the glasses will tilt down, because the curve of the arm will sit on your ears. This results in really poor vision (as you can imagine). It sounds stupid tha…
BTW - These acetate frame arms can usually be heated carefully with a torch, and bent to straighten them up. Thus making them much longer. Sometimes you can even rebend them farther back. Though straighter arms are somewhat more prone to fall from your face.
Re: Why are glasses so expensive? The eyewear industry prefers to keep that blurry
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like this could easily be solved by selling the hearing aids with a smartphone app to test your hearing and tune the aids, and a pair of flat frequency response headphones for testing.
Read about the OTC hearing aid law signed 2 years ago. http://www.hearingreview.com/2017/08/president-trump-signs-o...
tl;dr: The gist is that, by near year I think, people with mild-to-moderate hearing loss will be able to buy hearing aids without having to see a doctor or get a prescription. (I'm always amazed when the bureaucracy makes something easier rather than more difficult.)
Re: Why are glasses so expensive? The eyewear industry prefers to keep that blurry
#476You want to know what's outrageously expensive, yet equally important for basic ability to function in the workplace and other situations? Hearing aids. Hearing aids are glasses for your ears. But compared to them, glasses are unbelievably dirt cheap, and basically fully covered by a lot of decent company insurance plans. Hearing aids? Not the case. Imagine if glasses cost $2-3000 per lens. PER LENS. And your company…
One word: Costco. The hearing aids alone pay for decades of membership fees.
My partner used to spend $10,000AUD on each hearing aid. It was insane. Now that we're going to Costco, she's paying $3000AUD each. It's still really expensive, but it's a darn sight better.
Re: Why are glasses so expensive? The eyewear industry prefers to keep that blurry
#477I haven't tried this personally but I should plug endmyopia.org if for no other reason than to give some more picture on the practices of this industry.
Re: Why are glasses so expensive? The eyewear industry prefers to keep that blurry
#478Reminder, if you're in the US, the FTC says your eye doctor must give you your prescription after your exam. If a doctor refuses to do so, they can face legal action and penalties. https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2016/05/buying-prescriptio... That said, I don't think the FTC stipulates what information must appear on the prescription. Many docs leave off your PD (pupillary distance), which is a necessary measuremen…
Eye exams are important. I have a cordial astigmatism in my left eye, I would not have know about without it. The eye glass seller in longwood boston will measure your pupil distance, and check that your online glasses match the prescription when you get them. He charges a small fee for this.
Would that be Longwood Optical?
Re: Why are glasses so expensive? The eyewear industry prefers to keep that blurry
#479The reason glasses cost so much is because one company owns: (1) nearly all brand name frames including Ray-Ban, Oakley, Prada eyewear, Armani eyewear and so on, (2) nearly all retail stores such as LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, Sears Optical and Target Optical and (3) EyeMed, one of the largest vision insurance companies. See this eye-opening 60 Minutes story on Luxottica: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDdq2rIqAlM…
Yep they own the industry, they've tried buying Warby Parker numerous times because they are hurting their monopoly (so I've heard). WP, won't play ball and be bought up.
Re: Why are glasses so expensive? The eyewear industry prefers to keep that blurry
#480A few years ago I found a technique on youtube to help myopia by wearing slightly lower prescription glasses. And the author recommended zennithoptical.com for cheap glasses. I was almost shocked to find their price to be that cheap. And when I bought a couple of pairs, it turns out their quality is quite decent. I have since bought more than a dozen glasses from zennithoptical.com, at a total cost of about $300. And…
> A few years ago I found a technique on youtube to help myopia by wearing slightly lower prescription glasses. That is not physically possible. Maybe (and that's a big concession, I'm very skeptical) it could work with kids, with still-developing eyes. No amount of glasses trickery will reshape your cornea in adulthood. Other than the physical world constraints, if this hypothesis was true, people's myopia would nev…
I don't know if it works with kids.
I'm a programmer, I look at the computer monitor probably about 8 hours per day. What I did was that I wear a glass with weaker prescription so that when I look at the computer monitor, the characters are slightly blurred but I can still read them. I did this for about 6 month and my prescription went from -5.75, -5.25 to -4.75, -4.25. Actually when I started even with the -5.75, -5.25 prescription my vision is about 1.2 or so.
Unfortunately this technique seems to only work at the beginning. In the months following the first 6 months my vision didn't improve anymore so I stopped it. But I consider spending $300 to knock off 1 point prescription from each eye quite worth it.
By the way I never got any headache from wearing weaker prescription glasses (and I did get headache before when wearing stronger prescription glasses). Actually I found it comfortable to wear weaker prescription glasses when reading, because my eyes don't feel stressed. That is actually the optometrist at Costo suggested to me.