This is good advice, I just got my first pair and they make a huge difference in comfort, and being able to stare at a screen throughout the day. Particularly if you are nearsighted and already wear glasses, the need for computer glasses may sneak up on you. I found that by afternoon/evening my eyes were tired and having problems focusing on a screen with my regular glasses.
The way my eye doctor explained it, there's two compounding problems - we start losing the ability to focus up close in our 40s, and distance-vision glasses push the near focus point further out. Eventually the near point is close to or further than the distance to your monitor/laptop, and your eye muscles have to strain to be able to focus.
I've tried for a couple of years to get this sorted, but I can't find an optometrist who can understand what I'm trying to say. I got so animated trying to explain it, I got told to "calm down" by the last one, who also gave me another useless prescription, which I spent hundreds of dollars having made into glasses, only to be disappointed. Again. Maybe someone here can help.
One of my experiments was to get a pair of actual "computer glasses." If I sit at the perfect distance from the screen, they're fantastic. However, at that distance, even the top and bottom of the screen is enough of a difference that they are fuzzy. Apparently, the so-called "working distance" of the prescription is so narrow that even a couple of inches either way will ruin it. I don't want a laser-focused prescription that only works within an inch. Am I saying that right? Is "working distance" the distance at which the prescription works, or the distance between the near and far usable distance?
I want my single-distance prescription _tweaked_ to work _closer_. My current prescription does pretty well from about 2 feet to near infinity. I want the "center" of this workable range brought closer. I want the usable range of the prescription to be "in the room," say, 20 feet at the far end to whatever it works out to at the close end. I expect this will bring my screen into sharp focus, at the expense of, say, driving, where I could use a different pair. I just don't want to have to change glasses when I get up and get a cup of coffee. How can I explain this to an optometrist? Because I've failed about 3 times now, and have $1000 of worthless glasses to show for it.
If I understand correctly you want to pull your focus range in a little bit more, at the loss of some distance sharpness.
Essentially, you just want to add a little bit of “plus” sphere to the first part of the prescription.
That’s essentially the ethos behind the article, btw. Computer glasses mosty add plus to the spherical part of your prescription.
All of this being said, if you’re older, you’re becoming presbyopic, whereby the intraocular lens has lost its elasticity and will no longer be able to change its shape to modulate focus. And thus prescriptions will almost never meet your demands, short of some major improvements in artificial lens implant technology which may be available in the next few years. Some currently available surgically implanted intraocular lenses do have some measure of this (Alcon panoptix, j&j symfony, to a lesser extent Alcon vivity/J&J tecnis), but you can’t cheat physics and will end up with aberrations that could frustrate you more than your current issues.
According to my optometrist, the default practice in choosing a prescription for computer glasses is to divide your typical prescription for nearsightedness in half. Thus a 1 diopter prescription for everyday glasses becomes a ½ diopter prescription for computer glasses. That worked nicely for me, where my screens are about 2.5 feet away.
I have about -4.5 spherical and 0.75 cylyindrical (eyes aren't exactly the same but that's about the average). I chose to weaken the spherical on each side by 1, 1.25 and 1.5 (couldn't decide after holding reading glasses in front of my normal glasses at the grocery store). I didn't correspondingly weaken the cylindrical, though probably should have. Ordered all three from Zenni. If you get high-index plastic but no fancy coatings and a basic frame, this is really cheap enough to be worth experimenting, and they don't care if you upload hacked "experimental" prescriptions.
About the only catch is you need your pupil distance. I got it written down for me at a couple of eye exams, a Costco optician measured it using a gadget he had, and I measured it by a method I thought up myself - just look at something distant through binoculars and adjust until the image circles merge, then measure center-to-center on the eyepiece lenses. ALL the numbers ended up different. So I just kinda picked the average.
Not very scientific, but all three glasses are OK, and the ones I like best, I really wear them all the time now except for driving.
You don't really need an optometrist to do the computer prescription. Just take the regular prescription and add to SPH (sphere) on both eyes, following the diopter formula for the distance you want for infinity, e.g. +1 SPH for 1 meter or +1.25 SPH for 0.8 meters. I put orders into Zenni and wait a few weeks.
Yes I had exactly this issue— I had to keep straining my neck so I can see the monitor through the “sweet spot” at the bottom of my reading glasses. So I read somewhere that computer glasses are a thing, but didn’t want to pay LensCrafters another ~$300+ for glasses. So I went online to Zenni Optical , and entered my normal prescription, plus the all-important PD (self measured Pupillary Distance, which your optometrist will NOT tell you), and specified “computer glasses” and got a pair delivered for around $60. I don’t recall if I measured the distance to the computer… but that’s a good point obviously, maybe I will get another pair and do it right.
If anyone has recommendations for glasses online I’d appreciate hearing those. Warby Parker seems good, haven’t tried them. Zenni wasn’t bad, the glasses seem slightly off, it could be due to my self measurements.
I first got glasses as a kid when I was about -1 diopter nearsighted. In the long term it stabilized at about -4.5 and then, of course, with age, the focusing ability went away. Now I wear a weakened prescription for working at the computer that leaves me... about -1 diopter nearsighted. And I'm totally used to keeping those glasses on all the time around the house and (memory is fading!) the office. Sort of come full circle. I do have to switch to normal glasses for driving, of course.
But yes, getting dedicated glasses for the distance at which I use a computer screen was a complete game changer. No compromise, just good vision. With mail-order outfits (Zenni in my case) you can experiment... I ordered glasses weakened by -1, -1.25 and -1.5 diopters and just picked my favourites.
AFAIK, both Windows and MasOS allow you to rescale your windows and their contents to be bigger. This is a smart zoom that doesn't simply upsize every pixel on the display. So high density displays should no longer require squinting for us folks over 40.
Seeing more or having more open at once is beneficial, but so is comfort.
I bought it in 2018, but only recently I have found my 28" 4K is too small at 100% scaling. I think it is roughly the same distance away, but I'm not going to be uncomfortable, so I scale it to 125% now.
I've also found this more necessary later in the day vs when I just woke up.
Same thing ui designers. Thats why I resize all the fonts on the page. The probably negates all the UI designers attempts to make the audience go blind
I agree with this advice. My daily headaches stopped completely after getting computer glasses (which are just prescription glasses with the resting focal distance of about 6’ and higher-than-normal blue light filtering.) The only issue is that I often forget to swap to normal glasses so things are a little blurrier when I’m outside.
The older the eyes, the more of the youthful ability to shift focal distance is lost. No single-focus glasses can mitigate this.
If you're 60+, the workaround is one to three smallish monitors, 24-26", arranged in an arc equidistant from the eyes, along with glasses focused at just that distance.
Great advice--I found out I had astigmatism nearly 20 years ago when going to the Eye Dr. for my first pair of computer glasses. I've been having them add #1 rose tint and Crizal ever since!
Some doctors say get them and say any works, some specify brands, and many doctors say don't get one as long as you have not been prescribed powered specs and since this is one of those things related to medical field that one can't just do it on their own based on things read on the Internet, so I end up never getting one.
The way my eye doctor explained it, there's two compounding problems - we start losing the ability to focus up close in our 40s, and distance-vision glasses push the near focus point further out. Eventually the near point is close to or further than the distance to your monitor/laptop, and your eye muscles have to strain to be able to focus.