Can you try making frames out of this Tougher and lighter Material?


Frames made of polycarbonate (RecSpecs come to mind, but I'm sure there are others) are available for safety applications. Since optical quality isn't an issue when making a frame, I would imagine polycarbonate will continue to be used for frames.

The question, it seems to me, concerns the final price of trivex lenses. Polycarbonate lenses are inexpensive (basically the same or less than plastic). If trivex lenses are going to cost more than poly, my guess is they won't "make it" in the ophthalmic marketplace (after all, if optical quality was the most important issue, we'd all be selling glass).

I notice that the manufacturers working with trivex have decided to focus their demonstrations on the lack of "internal stress" in trivex lenses. The samples I've seen at the shows are somewhat "distressing" (pun intended). There are processes for casting poly blanks which do NOT result in a lot of internal stress, and one has to conclude that the demonstrators have been made to exaggerate the differences.

The Abbe Value is higher? How many patients really have complaints related to chromatic aberration (yes, I've had a few that I could trace to CA, but not many)? Most people stay within a relatively small zone in the lens, and the visual acuity of the eye away from our central vision is naturally cruddy anyway, so peripheral vision in straight ahead gaze isn't affected by CA.

I guess you can just put me down as a trivex skeptic (or as a poly fan, maybe I'm just biased). Now that the wholesalers have invested in machinery designed with poly in mind, we may find that even they have become fans of the only lens material to show significant growth over the past few years!