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Wearing eyeglasses while using a riflescope

Turbulent Turtle

F-TR competitor
Gold $$ Contributor
I’m placing this post in the Competition forum, though I think it would fit well in Optics forum.

As those of you who have read my material here know, I am passionate about optical IQ, CA control and mirage. My hypothesis is that a riflescope that doesn’t control CA very well, intensifies the disruptive effect of atmospheric shimmer (mirage) on the Image Quality (IQ) of a riflescope substantially. This causes the users of those riflescopes to have to dial down the magnification to attempt to deal with bad mirage conditions.

Over many years, I have become aware that my glasses caused the IQ of the riflescope to diminish, and sometimes by quite a bit. I have long been a proponent of shooting your high dollar riflescopes without glasses and I know that I am not the only one. I was never enthusiastic about that belief; I really wanted some form of eye protection.

A few weeks ago, while doing research for another article, I became aware that eyeglasses were CA generators. As we know, there are different types of glass do control CA and some are far better than others. Also, optical engineers can also attempt to control CA without the use of the fancier glasses but only do so for a very few selected wavelengths (color). Unfortunately, these materials are not available for eyeglasses, and they are expensive and weigh more.

Eyeglasses and safety glasses are usually made with either glass, or plastic, the most common being polycarbonate, or polycarb. Polycarb is great for protection but is especially lousy for CA, in fact, it’s a friggin CA generator. (I may be exaggerating, but not by much.)

My research revealed there is another material that is used to make eyeglasses and safety glasses, and also has impact resistance. This material is Trivex. I found a site that will make you safety glasses with Trivex. It’s zenni.com. This is an American company, founded in 2003, in Novato, CA. My first order was shipped from Ohio. When they arrived I thought the case was empty, they are so light.

This past weekend at Bayou, I tried out my Trivex safety glasses shooting my Majesta at 1000 yards. I wore them for all 3 matches, and they did very well for me. I could tell the difference in IQ between wearing my regular polycarb glasses and wearing Trivex glasses. I could not tell the difference between naked eye and Trivex glasses. As far as I’m concerned, they did the trick. I ordered another set of Trivex glasses, this time with my prescription.

The ordering process is simple enough but there is something that you must be aware of. After you select your lenses with whatever goodies you want in them, including your prescription, if you need that, you will get to a question regarding Lens Index, and there will be several choices. To get the Trivex glass, and they may refer to it as Premium, you MUST select the 1.53 Impact-resistant option that costs $29.95. That is the Trivex glass. Anything else is either polycarb or non-impact resistant glass. Please be aware that the prescription range is from +2.00 to -3.00 for the Trivex (1.53 index). If you are not presented with that choice, you’re not getting the Trivex. It must be 1.53. I had to redo it a few times to get the 1.53 choice for my prescription pair.

Now for prices, brace yourself. The Trivex safety glasses cost $60, shipped. The prescription pair with various other features cost $120. The description of the lenses for those glasses is “1.53 Blokz Trivex Digital Free Form Progressive.” Notice the 1.53 and the Trivex.

Now for the normal caveats. I am sharing with you my findings freely. I am NOT a doctor or an optician/optometrist. I do not sell anything and make no promises about anything.

I will say that I will not be surprised if many of the ones of decide to try this Trivex, do not detect any benefit. Some people are more sensitive to CA (seem to detect it). When I tried on the Trivex glasses after pulling off my regular glasses, I noticed a greater degree of vibrancy or color popping. It seems they sell these glasses to golfers and bird watchers.

I am pleased that I now have safety glasses to protect my dreamy eyes and rugged good looks, without destroying the IQ provided by my expensive riflescopes. It is my contention that polycarbs contribute to the IQ destruction of shimmer/mirage, but do not expect miracles, this is subtle and incremental, and as I said, most people will be hard put to see any difference.
 
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Some further thoughts on shooting with glasses.

As I have explained in the past, a riflescope is an afocal optical device, and you are looking through the riflescope with your far vision. The reticle is located such that it merges in the afocal image and the “diopter” setting is just a fine-tuning mechanism. This is why people who have progressive lenses can still use a riflescope because they look through the scope with the top (far vision) of their lenses. If we were using our near vision to look through a riflescope, we would have to flip our glasses upside down or get full lens cheaters.

Eyeglasses do not focus the image to our eye; they just bend the light a little or more to help the iris focus the image properly on the retina. If your far vision prescription is strong, the light bending is more pronounced and the Trivex lenses mentioned above should make a more pronounced difference to the IQ.
 
I have found a few other places that say they have Trivex lenses. I've looked at REKS (they call it ColorBoost) and RX Safety, but I found Zenni.com to be the easiest one to order from. I'm easily confused by concepts, and Zenni was one that I could follow.
 
I’m placing this post in the Competition forum, though I think it would fit well in Optics forum.

As those of you who have read my material here know, I am passionate about optical IQ, CA control and mirage. My hypothesis is that a riflescope that doesn’t control CA very well, intensifies the disruptive effect of atmospheric shimmer (mirage) on the Image Quality (IQ) of a riflescope substantially. This causes the users of those riflescopes to have to dial down the magnification to attempt to deal with bad mirage conditions.

Over many years, I have become aware that my glasses caused the IQ of the riflescope to diminish, and sometimes by quite a bit. I have long been a proponent of shooting you high dollar riflescopes without glasses and I know that I am not the only one. I was never enthusiastic about that belief, I really wanted some form of eye protection.

A few weeks ago, while doing research for another article, I became aware that eyeglasses were CA generators. As we know, there are different types of glass do control CA and some are far better than others. Also, optical engineers can also attempt to control CA without the use of the fancier glasses but only do so for a very few selected wavelengths (color). Unfortunately, these materials are not available for eyeglasses, and they are expensive and weigh more.

Eyeglasses and safety glasses are usually made with either glass, or plastic, the most common being polycarbonate, or polycarb. Polycard is great for protection but is especially lousy for CA, in fact, it’s a friggin CA generator. (I may be exaggerating, but not by much.)

My research revealed there is another material that is used to make eyeglasses and safety glasses, and also has impact resistance. This material is Trivex. I found a site that will make you safety glasses with Trivex. It’s zenni.com. This is an American company, founded in 2003, in Novato, CA. My first order was shipped from Ohio. When they arrived I thought the case was empty, they are so light.

This past weekend at Bayou, I tried out my Trivex safety glasses shooting my Majesta at 1000 yards. I wore them for all 3 matches, and they did very well for me. I could tell the difference in IQ between wearing my regular polycarb glasses and wearing Trivex glasses. I could not tell the difference between naked eye and Trivex glasses. As far as I’m concerned, they did the trick. I ordered another set of Trivex glasses, this time with my prescription.

The ordering process is simple enough but there is something that you must be aware of. After you select your lenses with whatever goodies you want in them, including your prescription, if you need that, you will get to a question regarding Lens Index, and there will be several choices. To get the Trivex glass, and they may refer to it as Premium, you MUST select the 1.53 Impact-resistant option that costs $29.95. That is the Trivex glass. Anything else is either polycard or non-impact resistant glass. Please be aware that the prescription range is from +2.00 to -3.00 for the Trivex (1.53 index). If you are not presented with that choice, you’re not getting the Trivex. It must be 1.53. I had to redo it a few times to get the 1.53 choice for my prescription pair.

Now for prices, brace yourself. The Trivex safety glasses cost $60, shipped. The prescription pair with various other features cost $120. The description of the lenses for those glasses is “1.53 Blokz Trivex Digital Free Form Progressive.” Notice the 1.53 and the Trivex.

Now for the normal caveats. I am sharing with you my findings freely. I am NOT a doctor or an optician/optometrist. I do not sell anything and make no promises about anything.

I will say that I will not be surprised if many of the ones of decide to try this Trivex, do not detect any benefit. Some people are more sensitive to CA (seem to detect it). When I tried on the Trivex glasses after pulling off my regular glasses, I noticed a greater degree of vibrancy or color popping. It seems they sell these glasses to golfers and bird watchers.

I am pleased that I now have safety glasses to protect my dreamy eyes and rugged good looks, without destroying the IQ provided by my expensive riflescopes. It is my contention that polycarbs contribute to the IQ destruction of shimmer/mirage, but do not expect miracles, this is subtle and incremental, and as I said, most people will be hard put to see any difference.
What does CA stand for?
 
Your experience with it and your clear concise report will be helpful to those that take it in--me for one. I shoot without my glasses--I have had poor experiences with safety glasses --they do not help they hinder--so I for one am very interested in your findings and experiences--I have been looking for an answer
Safe that does not hurt my scope ability --Thanks a Ton for sharing
 
I wear Trivex progressive lenses and have discovered that optical compromises are baked into the progressive design. Distance vision is not as clear as single vision lenses or traditional bifocals. My next shooting glasses will be Trivex standard bifocals. I need to be able to do close work as well as distance work.

I second the endorsement of Trivex. Trivex is much more optically true than polycarbonate. It is also very light and scratch-resistant.
 
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A convex lens has a slightly different focal length for different colors of light. If a riflescope is sharply focused for red light, then blue light and green light will be slightly out of focus. This gives rise to undesirable color-fringing called chromatic aberration. Riflescopes can partially correct this with specialized lens coatings. These specialized coatings aren’t traditionally used for eyeglasses.
 
Did you order a single vision or progressive?
I wear progressive bifocals.
My distance vision is much better than up close.
I cant read jack without my glasses!
The first pair that I ordered was the safety glasses, with no prescription. I wanted the least expensive Trivex glasses that I could get and kept them simple. If I was shooting without glasses up to now, I just wanted a shield with no other changes. I say for the first test, they aced it.
Like you I can't read without glasses, but as I explained, you're using your far vision to see through a riflescope, it's afocal.
 
What does CA stand for?
As was already stated, CA stands for Chromatic Aberration. If you are familiar with the well-known graphics of light entering a prism and on the other side all the colors are separated, you now have an idea of chromatic aberration. When you refract light (bend the light) in your objective lens, the various colors that make up the light will focus at different distances on the first focal plane. This is called dispersion. The result of this color dispersion is color fringing, soft color separation. When you are looking at a target the rings are not as crisp as they should be. The more you bend the light, the greater the dispersion.
 
Your experience with it and your clear concise report will be helpful to those that take it in--me for one. I shoot without my glasses--I have had poor experiences with safety glasses --they do not help they hinder--so I for one am very interested in your findings and experiences--I have been looking for an answer
Safe that does not hurt my scope ability --Thanks a Ton for sharing
I have ordered another pair with my full prescription. They should arrive this week. I will report back on them.
I will state here that the safety glasses with Trivex lenses are incredibly light. I have been wearing glasses for close to 60 years, and these are the lightest I've ever had.
 
A convex lens has a slightly different focal length for different colors of light. If a riflescope is sharply focused for red light, then blue light and green light will be slightly out of focus. This gives rise to undesirable color-fringing called chromatic aberration. Riflescopes can partially correct this with specialized lens coatings. These specialized coatings aren’t traditionally used for eyeglasses.
The first part is correct, you have properly defined the issue with CA. I will take it from here.
Telescopes, riflescopes, telephoto lenses, and various other optics, anything that refracts (bends) the light, will suffer from CA. Without getting too technical, optical engineers have used combinations of different types of glass to correct specific wavelengths (colors), and apochromatic doublets and so on. High end optics will be able to correct the CA for 2 or 3 wavelengths, not the whole spectrum. This is where ED glass comes in. ED stands for Extra low Dispersion. This is a manufactured glass that reduces color dispersion for all wavelengths (AFAIK). The ultimate glass with the lowest dispersion is Fluorite Crystal glass, also known as CaF2 (Calcium Fluorite.) Please note the name fluorite, with a T. Not to be confused with fluoride, with a D.

Kowa make spotters with CaF2 glass for their objective. In my opinion, they are the best spotters on the planet. There are some with greater resolution, because of their larger objectives, but Kowa rules the mirage.

CaF2 is not a good material for a riflescope, it's fragile and subject to temperature shifting. We already had ED glass and now there are many riflescope brands using ED glass. But ED glass is not like fluorite crystal, it controls CA, but not completely. Super ED glass contains a lot of fluorite crystal in a matrix making it strong and special formulations render it temperature insensitive. The March Majesta has 2 big-ash Super ED lenses in the objective. So does the March-X High Master, the March-FX PRS scope and a few others. Super ED is very expensive.

The number that denotes the level of dispersion "resistance" or control is the Abbe number. Higher values are best. Normal glass is 30 to 50. ED glass is 80. Super ED and CaF2 are 95. (Super ED is a touch below CaF2, but it's a fraction.)

Coatings do not control the dispersion. Coatings only reduce the amount of light that is reflected by wavelength, which is why you need multiple coatings (one for each wavelength), and some manufacturers introduce hues and tints in their lenses by varying the coatings and their application.
 
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Shooting with glasses suck. Lenses on top of scope lenses just add up to produce distorsion. Eye glass are not flat but curve with different perspective between your eye and varying thickness of the glasses. They are not helping shooting but are creating problems.I remove them for shooting and I do very very well without them. No point in adding layer of glass or even worse plastic in front of a 5k scope where lenses were made for precision.
 
I get my glasess from RX safety, they stay clear and scratch free, I use to get my glasses at walmart rx and in 2 weeks they would be scratched so bad I could not even see out of them, they walmart put some coating on that just wore off in no time, I get the glasses from RX Safety I think they are in NY, they send extra frames cleaning cloths side shields the works, I wear safety because they last longer
 
I get my glasess from RX safety, they stay clear and scratch free, I use to get my glasses at walmart rx and in 2 weeks they would be scratched so bad I could not even see out of them, they walmart put some coating on that just wore off in no time, I get the glasses from RX Safety I think they are in NY, they send extra frames cleaning cloths side shields the works, I wear safety because they last longer
RX Safety also has Trivex lenses.
 

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