Yesterday we had a customer that wanted a magnifier that would magnify 5x but most of our magnifiers list their power in diopters.

I looked in the catalogs to find a coversion between diopters and magnification, but it doesn't make sense to me. In B&L's catalog they say that an 8 diopter is the same as 2x, but Coil says that an 8 diopter is the same as 3x. Why the difference? I've checked with several people but nobody can explain this.

Bill