An intricate system of conveyer tracks moves job trays from one station to another in the Hoya Lens of America's new, state-of-the-art lens facility in Bethel, Conn.

Lenses dispensed in the future will depend, to some extent, on the equipment laboratories use to process them. The industry has already seen an example of how lab equipment can influence the lens market. The number of labs capable of producing AR coatings rose during the past 10 years from a handful to close to a hundred. As a result, sales of AR coatings have soared from less than one percent to more than 6 percent.

Remote Scanning

Wrapping up frames and sending them to the lab is a tremendous nuisance -- for both lab and doctor. Though labs routinely scan every frame coming through and sometimes the scanning data is used to generate a pattern blank, more often now it is used to control patternless edgers.

A number of systems have been devised to allow doctors and dispensers to scan frames in the office, eliminating the need to send frames to the lab. This can cut at least a full day from the lab's turn-around time. However, several issues prevent wider use of remote scanning. One is cost of the equipment. Customers love the idea, but when the issue of cost comes up, they typically expect the lab to pay for scanners. Even a small lab can service 100 accounts, and providing scanners to all would require a $1,500,000 investment.

The issue may be coming to a head, however, as a new manufacturer-owned lab has announced plans to give remote scanners to its lab customers -- a scanner that will, of course, only transmit orders to their lab.

If scanning a frame provides the most accurate way to edge a lens for that frame, why don't labs store scanned information to reuse? Three reasons: The overwhelming number of frames in use; storage limitations; and inconsistencies in frame sizes.

The need for scanning each frame will, however, ultimately disappear. As frame manufacturers learn to control sizes more precisely, a data bank will be created from which labs will simply download each frame's scanning data. Sending frames to the lab will vanish much the way lens cutters did.

Robotic Labs

There are no all-robotic labs in the United States yet, but a number of labs are buying robotic equipment for portions of their production line. In Europe, where labs tend to be fewer in number and larger in size, all-robotic production lines are not uncommon. U.S. labs undoubtedly will adapt this advanced technology as well.

Compensating PAL Prescriptions

Some of the newest PALs alter the doctor's prescription to compensate for the "as worn" concept. To date, these calculations can only be made by the lens manufacturer for factory-produced progressives. However, one manufacturer plans to release a software program that computes these lens changes to its distributor labs in the United States. When this happens, there should be increased acceptance of the concept. It's one more example of how developments in lab equipment impact the lens market.

Surface-To-Coat

For years, lab owners have wished they could take lenses from the generator directly to coating, eliminating fining and polishing. Though it is possible to coat the frosted surface of a lens coming off the generator, the optics aren't acceptable for several reasons.

Conventional generators using a donut-shaped diamond wheel produce surfaces that have elliptical error, but fining (smoothing) and polishing lenses on accurate surfacing tools removes the error. Since replacing fining and polishing with coating would leave the elliptical error, some newer generators use a pointed tool instead of a wheel. This produces no elliptical error, but leaves a minute point in the center that reduces optics when coated instead of fined and polished.

Eventually, however, the surface-to-coat technique will be perfected. Once it is, labs will eliminate a bothersome and time-consuming operation as well as do away with the problem of maintaining a large inventory of properly calibrated tools. More important, labs will then be able to produce the atoric lenses that many believe will be the lens of the future.

For lab owners, trying to anticipate future equipment needs can be perplexing. Some observers even question whether labs will produce lenses the way they do today. It may turn out that the cast-to-prescription process will make more sense for labs than for manufacturers. If that day comes, labs will essentially have become lens manufacturers. EB