I recently purchased a new pair of eyeglasses with what are allegedly state-of-the-art Zeiss lenses of high-index plastic, with the latest hardness treatment and AR coatings. When I received the glasses, however, it was immediately apparent that they do not have the (paid-for) coatings, as the reflections from the lenses are colorless and seemingly as bright as the reflection from an uncoated surface. The proprietor of the optical shop was not in when I picked them up, but her assistant tried to assure me that this colorless reflection is a characteristic of SOTA AR coatings today. I am highly skeptical.

I am not a physicist or optics professional, but I am a physician with a hard-science and engineering background and some grounding in physics as well as a lifelong avocational involvement with optics, as an amateur photographer and amateur astronomer and a person with a keen appreciation for fine lenses and other optics. If some new technology--using continuous-gradient-index of refraction coatings or the like--has enabled AR coatings to be pan-spectral and to render colorless reflections, it's news to me.

So what I want to know is: Can I go back to the optical shop when I return from vacation and tell the proprietor that it's unequivocally obvious that my lenses aren't coated, and insist that she either send them back for coating or give me a refund? Or is there something to what the assistant told me?

Secondly, after only a week of wearing, with one daily cleaning (with a drop of shampoo during my morning shower, followed by careful drying with soft, non-lotion residential toilet paper) and almost no other touching of the lenses, the lenses have several fine scratches and several tiny pits (the glasses did fall once a couple of inches onto the hard shift-lever area of my car's console). Looking at them alongside the hardened plastic lenses of my 11-year-old glasses, it's hard to believe that the old ones have seen 500 times the service of the new ones. If I try to extrapolate the rate of scratch accumulation times 500, I can't even see through the lenses!

So a question for anyone in the industry: Is it plausible that a pair of lenses produced by a reputable nationwide lab got through without the intended hardness treatment step, especially if, as I suspect mine did, they got through without the intended AR coating step?

Thanks for your time and help,


Howard L Ritter, Jr, M.D.
hlritter@adelphia.net