buyer’s guide

SPECTACLE LENSES

Alicia Hoglund and Susan Tarrant

MORE CHOICES

Carl Zeiss Vision announces a new customized free-form progressive lens series, Choice, consisting of three new PALs: Zeiss Progressive Choice, Zeiss Progressive Choice Plus, and Zeiss Progressive Choice Plus V. The series is designed to offer ECPs with choices to best meet patient and marketplace needs.

Zeiss Progressive Choice lenses are optically optimized for up to 30 percent larger fields of clear vision and have four corridor options sized for 13, 15, 17, and 19mm fitting heights. They are priced and dispensed like a semi-finished lens.

Choice Plus and Plus V are customized for the wearer’s sphere, cyl, axis, and add for up to 40 percent larger fields of vision compared with conventional PALs, according to Zeiss. Both use Center of Rotation Evaluation technology to sharpen vision throughout the lens.

Choice Plus offers five corridor options. Choice Plus V employs a corridor sized in 0.1mm increments to the fitting height of the frame automatically.

INFO: zeiss.com/lenses

NO BLUE, NO GLARE

Essilor of America introduces Crizal Prevencia No-Glare lenses. The lenses offer wearers selective protection from both harmful blue light and UV rays.

Blue light is emitted by the sun and artificial light sources such as LED screens, computers, and smartphones. A specific range of the light may have a harmful effect on the retina, while another range plays a beneficial role on health. Crizal Prevencia lenses feature Light Scan, a technology allowing beneficial blue light to pass through the lens while filtering out the harmful blue light.

Crizal Prevencia also offers protection against glare, scratches, dust, and water, and has an Eye-Sun Protection Factor (E-SPF) of 25.

INFO: crizalusa.com

CARL ZEISS VISION
Zeiss Progressive Choice series

ESSILOR OF AMERICA
Crizal Prevencia

a closer look

Love Your Mother With a protective nod to Mother Earth, Zeal Optics has launched the first and only plant-based lens that upholds high optical standards for quality and clarity while minimizing the impact on the environment. The new e-llume lens uses a plant-based bonding agent, thus replacing the petroleum-based bonder. Currently, Zeal produces all of its sunglass frames with Z-resin, a plant-based material that uses castor oil, eliminating harmful crude oil from the manufacturing process. Recently, its engineering team found a way to reformulate the bonding agent in the lens to replace the crude oil with castor oil while maintaining a 38 Abbe value clarity in an active lens. The material cannot be Rx’d at this time. Rx models will have traditional polarized lenses. Zeal has long-held brand principles of environmental and social responsibility, and has been driven by these types of innovative discoveries that push the boundaries of both the green movement and current optical stands, company representatives note. This is the first lens of its kind that can provide an ecological alternative to crude oil-based lenses. “Zeal has created a lens that will become the new industry benchmark for optical clarity with an environmental purpose,” says Zeal president John Sanchez. Zeal Optics’ patent-pending bio-based lenses offer protection from UVA, B, and C, as well as the ability to identify and block the negative light range called High Energy Visible (HEV) light. The e-llume lenses contain a special hard coating for scratch resistance along with an exclusive high-transmission polarized film for increased eye protection from harmful rays. Now available in select frame styles, the lens will be integrated into every Zeal sunglass by the end of the year. INFO: zealoptics.com ZEAL OPTICS Zeal style Darby featuring the e-llume lens

HOYA VISION CARE
Hoyalux Array

WIDE ARRAY

Hoya Vision Care’s newest free-form progressive lens, Hoyalux Array, is optimized for hyperopes, myopes, and astigmatics, and is available in all materials, including polarized. Array’s benefits include Hoya’s free-form backside surfacing technology, a wide viewing area for both myopic and hyperopic patients, and larger cut outs. The Array lens design includes Hoya’s Transmittance Control 3D Design software, which models nearly every scenario of how the eyes see with each Rx, compensates for position of wear, provides optimal intermediate and reading area placement, and offers better binocular vision and reduced swim.

VISION-EASE LENS
ChangeRx SFSV photochromic

OPTICAL DYNAMICS
sunSMART

ECPs will be able to choose from four different corridor profiles for an additional level of customization.

INFO: thehoyafreeformcompany.com

PHOTO CHANGE

In an effort to make photochromic lenses available to patients with varying budgets, Vision-Ease Lens announces its new ChangeRx SFSV lightweight plastic photochromic lenses. The lenses are available in semi-finished single vision, in gray and brown color options, and coated or uncoated. Future availability will include Vision-Ease Lens’s Novel (a general purpose progressive) and Novella (a short-corridor progressive) along with finished single vision with and without AR.

Change Rx lenses are made with homogeneous “in mass” manufacturing. They are 11 percent lighter than standard hard-resin lenses, have a 1.50 refractive index, provide 89.1 percent indoor light transmission, and activate to ISO Sunglass Category 3 range.

INFO: vision-ease.com

PHOTO SMART

Optical Dynamics’ new sun-SMART II photochromic lenses are available for use with the Q-2100 Digital Lens System for in-office lens production, and as uncuts through Vision Dynamics Laboratory. The new lens provides optimal vision in all light conditions, maintains darkness at high temperatures, and has long-lasting properties built into the lens material, according to the company.

Available in gray, the lens is described as being a typical use photochromic and ideal for the majority of patients, and joins Optical Dynamics’ photochromic line-up. sunSMART II lenses are available in progressive, FT-28, and aspheric single vision.

INFO: opticaldynamics.com

CONTACT LENSES

Yours Truly

Vistakon division of Johnson & Johnson Vision Care, Inc., announces the U.S. availability of 1-Day Acuvue TruEye brand contact lenses (narafilcon A), a silicon hydrogel daily disposable lens. Launched in 2008, it has been widely used throughout Europe, Japan, and other markets.

It is gradually replacing 1-Day Acuvue TruEye (narafilcon B) lenses, which were launched in the U.S. in 2010. Though the products have similar material properties, one key difference is that (narafilcon A) is available in two base curves, 8.5 and 9.0, allowing more patients to be fit with this lens.

The lenses feature Hydraclear 1 Technology to help maintain the natural ocular environment, allow 100 percent corneal oxygen consumption at all points across minus and plus powers, and Class-1 UV blocking. 1-Day Acuvue TruEye (narafilcon A) will only be available in 90-packs.

INFO: 800-874-5278, acuvueprofessional.com

VISTAKON
1-Day Acuvue TruEye (narafilcon A)