Hoya products in 2017...

[Uilleann]

[rbaker]

The "office manager" is making the decisions on lenses? Please let us know how that works out for you and your customers.

[Lab Insight]

The "office manager" is making the decisions on lenses? Please let us know how that works out for you and your customers.

Exactly.

[ak47]

The products can be very good, if and when you can get them and get them done correctly. But that is a BIIIIIIG if. Get ready for lab nightmares.

[CCGREEN]

The "office manager" is making the decisions on lenses? Please let us know how that works out for you and your customers.

We know nothing of "the office manager" cut him/her some slack. Him/her may be as or more then qualified then most of us in here. For business reasons they may want/need to take the office in Hoya's direction. (shall we pray) Yes ultimately that choice should be between the optician and the patient.
(Prejudging is a pet peeve of mine, gather the facts first please)

[Uilleann]

We know nothing of "the office manager" cut him/her some slack. Him/her may be as or more then qualified then most of us in here. For business reasons they may want/need to take the office in Hoya's direction. (shall we pray) Yes ultimately that choice should be between the optician and the patient.
(Prejudging is a pet peeve of mine, gather the facts first please)

Thanks CC. He's a good guy all around, and is quite a savvy businessman as well as a competent optician. He'd have to be given that the business is family owned, and has been growing steadily for more than 5 decades. We've has "lab issues" in the past from E, Zeiss, Shamir, VSP, Davis, and any large number of independents who shall remain nameless here to protect the guilty. I believe the hope was that this might be an improvement on the service front. We're routing through the Hoya lab in Tacoma (Seattle) presently.

My primary question was on the quality of products, as it's been so many long years since I've used them myself. And if there were any products - particularly on the PAL and AR fronts that should be go-to's, or avoided at all costs. If their service quality isn't up to snuff, they'll be dropped like a hot rock just like all the rest before.

Cheers!

[merrymaker]

I work at in an office that is primarily Hoya. We use Hoya-Modesto as we are in the bay area of CA.

Regarding the products, their EX3/Recharge EX3 are great coatings. EX3 might be, dare i say, more reliable than Avance. Although because they substrate match the coatings, EX3 and Poly (especially digital) come in with noticeable newton rings which is annoying but its incentive to go with Trivex, imo.

I confess to being a huge fan of Auto3 PAL but frankly the ID2 lens is a great PAL design that many of our patients are happy with.

My biggest gripe is the lack of product options. For instance, the ID2 doesnt come in a polarized version, meaning one must downgrade the pal option to their Array lens (basically Auto II) or use a different branded lens (like Auto3 Fashion which i prefer anyway.)
Also they don't have a Cat D backside coating, only a Cat B; due to the substrate matching the EX3 ARC cant be applied to many lens designs such as a Round 24 bifocal, again their only option is a garbage Cat B coating (whereas Avance can be applied to most anything.)

The good news is that Hoya is aware of these issues and trying to address them. This weekend we learned that Hoya's Photochromic brand Sensity now has a Green option (Hooray!, down with EssiSux.)

[Browman]

OK, so the office manager has decided that Hoya is going to be the new flavor of the week.

[Uilleann]

Suffering? Because of lens material / optical quality? Or the Seattle lab in particular? Please explain in greater detail.

[jefe]

The quality of Hoya's EX3 and SHV coatings is second to none, and I think that's very important to clients. Their PALs are expensive, but maybe your office manager negotiated a good deal.

[Uilleann]

The quality of Hoya's EX3 and SHV coatings is second to none, and I think that's very important to clients. Their PALs are expensive, but maybe your office manager negotiated a good deal.

Thanks for this info. As far as their ARs go, is it the scratch resistance, smudge resistance and cleanability, or the substrate matching you like most over other brands? Can you offer a bit more subjective opinion on those aspects? Thanks!

[ak47]

The scratch resistance is better than Avance, certainly crazes less than Crizal products. Smudging / cleanability not as good as Avance, but the EX3 is not too far behind in this area. I like the idea of substrate matching and suspect this leads to less scratching/crazing over the long run, but I am perplexed why they can't get a better aesthetic match for poly.
As an aside, I have horrendous luck with their 1.70 product when I get directly from Hoya lab. Great product when independent labs use it, but strangely nearly every 1.70 I get with AR directly from Hoya is crazed and I will not order it anymore.

[Browman]

Suffering? Because of lens material / optical quality? Or the Seattle lab in particular? Please explain in greater detail.

The product is good, I won't deny that, but it's a mater of getting that product in usable condition. We had to return lenses multiple times due to scratches and powers being OOT-- and I mean per job. There is little to no quality control at the lab level. The one job that for me sums up Hoya's dedication to quality is a SV poly safety with standard AR and transitions. NOT a high power job. They kept sending it back to us with incorrect combinations-- AR and transitions but not safety thickness, safety thickness and AR but no transitions, and, once, my favorite of all, everything was correct but the OD was transitions and the OS was not. This is going back about two years but IIRC it took almost eight weeks to get the job in. By that point our office manager had ended up giving the pt a full refund. He's sitll never coming back.

And all of that MIGHT even be acceptable, in some way, if it weren't for the company's attitude. And that is where I drew the line. Because it is never their fault. No matter how poor the quality, how damaged the lens, how late the job, "we're the ally of the ECP!" While our reputation was going down the drain, while I was losing the support of people I'd known and relied on for years, Hoya shrugged their shoulders, clicked their tongues, and assured me that they were "the ally of the ECP!" And did nothing. There were always excuses and never solutions. The only "solutions" they had were to blame some random customer service person or rep who had absolutely nothing to do with quality control or lenses. If we had a flawless job for every person Hoya threw under the bus we wouldn't have ad an issue. But the people on top were never willing to accept responsibility for the damage they caused. And when we severed ties, somehow, WE became the bad guy, and Hoya was blaming US for walking away. It took us going back to the big E to finally get the attention of someone who mattered, and then all they had to say was what a big mistake we were making. No apologies. No solutions. Just more finger pointing and guilt-tripping. And that is unacceptable.

Say what you will about the big E, but the people with whom I dealt always showed honesty, integrity, and ALWAYS accepted responsibility when things went wrong, and rectified it ASAP. I'll take that over anything else any day of the week.

[Uilleann]

The scratch resistance is better than Avance, certainly crazes less than Crizal products. Smudging / cleanability not as good as Avance, but the EX3 is not too far behind in this area. I like the idea of substrate matching and suspect this leads to less scratching/crazing over the long run, but I am perplexed why they can't get a better aesthetic match for poly.
As an aside, I have horrendous luck with their 1.70 product when I get directly from Hoya lab. Great product when independent labs use it, but strangely nearly every 1.70 I get with AR directly from Hoya is crazed and I will not order it anymore.

The product is good, I won't deny that, but it's a mater of getting that product in usable condition. We had to return lenses multiple times due to scratches and powers being OOT-- and I mean per job. There is little to no quality control at the lab level. The one job that for me sums up Hoya's dedication to quality is a SV poly safety with standard AR and transitions. NOT a high power job. They kept sending it back to us with incorrect combinations-- AR and transitions but not safety thickness, safety thickness and AR but no transitions, and, once, my favorite of all, everything was correct but the OD was transitions and the OS was not. This is going back about two years but IIRC it took almost eight weeks to get the job in. By that point our office manager had ended up giving the pt a full refund. He's sitll never coming back.

And all of that MIGHT even be acceptable, in some way, if it weren't for the company's attitude. And that is where I drew the line. Because it is never their fault. No matter how poor the quality, how damaged the lens, how late the job, "we're the ally of the ECP!" While our reputation was going down the drain, while I was losing the support of people I'd known and relied on for years, Hoya shrugged their shoulders, clicked their tongues, and assured me that they were "the ally of the ECP!" And did nothing. There were always excuses and never solutions. The only "solutions" they had were to blame some random customer service person or rep who had absolutely nothing to do with quality control or lenses. If we had a flawless job for every person Hoya threw under the bus we wouldn't have ad an issue. But the people on top were never willing to accept responsibility for the damage they caused. And when we severed ties, somehow, WE became the bad guy, and Hoya was blaming US for walking away. It took us going back to the big E to finally get the attention of someone who mattered, and then all they had to say was what a big mistake we were making. No apologies. No solutions. Just more finger pointing and guilt-tripping. And that is unacceptable.

Say what you will about the big E, but the people with whom I dealt always showed honesty, integrity, and ALWAYS accepted responsibility when things went wrong, and rectified it ASAP. I'll take that over anything else any day of the week.

This is my big fear. We've had some terrible labs before (from any number of vendors), but in the end, E has always been willing to work through issues and make things right. Sometimes it requires a call to the manager to get the ball rolling, but usually then, they will hit it out of the park for a good while. This is the real meat of the sort of info I was hoping to get. Thanks guys!!

[AngeHamm]

The ID LifeStyle 2 is one of the best-performing PALs I've ever worked with.