I'm old enough to have been in this business when digital surfacing was just being introduced. In the training seminar where all the Manhattan Lenscrafters were having digital generators installed, I vividly remember the presenters extolling the extreme flexibility of the technology, claiming that we would be able to basically throw a hockeypuck in and have any RX made for any frame.
Obviously the reality of the technology is just a little bit more restrictive than that. However, I am finding my understanding of the technology at odds with one of my labs, who insist that the software that plots the digital progressives specifies certain base curves for certain prescriptions. Specifically, I feel like my requests for 8BC sunglasses are hitting a wall, and I'm forced to dump out of superior lens designs into 15-year-old technology for the very prescriptions and frames that are most likely to create peripheral distortion. I'm pretty frustrated with having to put some of my patients with insurance restrictions into a Physio when there are several generations of improvements hypothetically available.
I thought the whole point of digital surfacing was flexibility, not inflexibility. Can my surfacing lab peeps edumacate me here?
Bookmarks