Non-perscription shooting glasses recommendations?
Moderators: pilkguns, m1963, David Levene, Spencer, Richard H
Non-perscription shooting glasses recommendations?
I have been using some pretty cheap saftey glasses, and am getting frustrated with scratches, fogging, and the generally short lifespan of saftey glasses. I don't wear corrective lenses, so purpose built shooting frames seems a big excessive. The range i use for smallbore and air rifle both require "eye protection", but don't require anything specific. Does anyone have any recommendations for a solid, relatively low cost pair of shooting glasses?
Re: Non-perscription shooting glasses recommendations?
Even if you don't wear prescription lenses, you may still benefit from shooting frames. Even people with 20/20 vision may benefit from a +0.25 diopter lens to help optimize your relaxed focal distance, and that's assuming that you have ABSOLUTELY no astigmatism.
But if you're absolutely dead-on sure that you don't need any sort of diopter correction in front of your perfect, Plano/Plano prescription eyeballs, I've been pretty happy with Rudy Project stuff. Solid construction, interchangeable lenses in every color imaginable, a scratch replacement policy, and they seem to always be on sale for one reason or another. Plus they actively support the shooting sports, including USPSA and (I think) some shotgunners with USA Shooting. While they are more expensive than what you can find at your local shooting shop, they've also lasted far longer than any of the cheapies I've ever had.
But if you're absolutely dead-on sure that you don't need any sort of diopter correction in front of your perfect, Plano/Plano prescription eyeballs, I've been pretty happy with Rudy Project stuff. Solid construction, interchangeable lenses in every color imaginable, a scratch replacement policy, and they seem to always be on sale for one reason or another. Plus they actively support the shooting sports, including USPSA and (I think) some shotgunners with USA Shooting. While they are more expensive than what you can find at your local shooting shop, they've also lasted far longer than any of the cheapies I've ever had.
Re: Non-perscription shooting glasses recommendations?
I buy "readers" from the 99 cent store. Get a strength that allows you to focus on the front sight. Put a piece of matte cellophane tape on the back side of the lens for the non-aiming eye.
They have plastic lenses so they won't shatter. It doesn't get any cheaper than this.
I am not implying that this is the set-up I use for myself.
They have plastic lenses so they won't shatter. It doesn't get any cheaper than this.
I am not implying that this is the set-up I use for myself.
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LennyLames
- Posts: 10
- Joined: Sat Jul 27, 2013 3:38 am
- Location: Scottsdale, AZ
Re: Non-perscription shooting glasses recommendations?
A while back, I was looking for shooting glasses with high clarity and was leaning toward glass lenses. I posed the question to my brother-in-law who happens to be an optometrist as well as a highpower rifle shooter of the thousand yard variety.
Turned out he had gone through a similar selection process. After paying thousands of dollars for a riflescope, he had to contend with poor clarity in his safety glasses.
My interpretation of his response: it's essentially a compromise between protection level and optical quality.
The common polycarbonate safety glasses are available with higher impact resistance ratings such as Z87.1-2010, etc. There are even ones that claim ballistic impact resistance with adherence to Military Ballistic MCEPS GL-PD 10-12 or MIL-PRF-31013. The ones with glass lenses, on the other hand, do not offer nearly the same level of impact resistance. I've only found glass lenses in tempered glass so protection isn't as good as polycarbonate. None of these will offer much protection from a direct shot. Even a ballistic-rated lens may only protect from a pellet.
Brother-in-law introduced me to Abbe values (higher is better), which indicates the lack of aberration. Polycarbonate lenses have the lowest, at 30. That explains why a brand new, unscratched (a condition that only lasts for a few minutes after first use) pair isn't clear, refracts when it's not supposed to, and gives me headaches. Crown glass is much higher, about 60. A good balance of protection and higher Abbe value than polycarbonate is a lens made from Trivex, but cost is much higher and it's still not as clear as glass.
So, when shooting subsonic smallbore or match air, as is everyone else around me, I use tempered glass (real glass) safety glasses with side shields, about $35. In a public shooting range with a wide range of calibers, chamber pressures, and pseudo-tacticals with questionable safety practices, I suffer with polycarbonate.
Turned out he had gone through a similar selection process. After paying thousands of dollars for a riflescope, he had to contend with poor clarity in his safety glasses.
My interpretation of his response: it's essentially a compromise between protection level and optical quality.
The common polycarbonate safety glasses are available with higher impact resistance ratings such as Z87.1-2010, etc. There are even ones that claim ballistic impact resistance with adherence to Military Ballistic MCEPS GL-PD 10-12 or MIL-PRF-31013. The ones with glass lenses, on the other hand, do not offer nearly the same level of impact resistance. I've only found glass lenses in tempered glass so protection isn't as good as polycarbonate. None of these will offer much protection from a direct shot. Even a ballistic-rated lens may only protect from a pellet.
Brother-in-law introduced me to Abbe values (higher is better), which indicates the lack of aberration. Polycarbonate lenses have the lowest, at 30. That explains why a brand new, unscratched (a condition that only lasts for a few minutes after first use) pair isn't clear, refracts when it's not supposed to, and gives me headaches. Crown glass is much higher, about 60. A good balance of protection and higher Abbe value than polycarbonate is a lens made from Trivex, but cost is much higher and it's still not as clear as glass.
So, when shooting subsonic smallbore or match air, as is everyone else around me, I use tempered glass (real glass) safety glasses with side shields, about $35. In a public shooting range with a wide range of calibers, chamber pressures, and pseudo-tacticals with questionable safety practices, I suffer with polycarbonate.
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ShootingSight
- Posts: 318
- Joined: Fri May 18, 2012 9:37 pm
- Location: Cincinnati, OH
- Contact:
Re: Non-perscription shooting glasses recommendations?
A couple of points:
1. The abbe value discussion is a red herring in most cases. Abbe value measures the ability of a lens to refract light as a function of frequency. This is why a prism creates a rainbow, because blue light is refracted a different amount than red light, so incident white light becomes a rainbow. Poor abbe value creates wider rainbows than good abbe values. However abbe errors are cosine dependent, and become zero when you look perpendicularly through a lens - you only get them as the light entering the lens starts to become parallel to the lens surface. For everyday glasses, polycarbonate might cause some rainbow fringing way out at the periphery of your view, but for looking at sight alignment which is reasonably in front of you, the error is smaller than your eye can resolve. For prone shooting, where you look at the extreme upper inside corner of glasses, a slight amount of rainbow fringing could become detectable with flat lenses, however for that type of shooting people often use Knobloch or similar glasses so they can re-align the lens with the direction of their view, or use wrapped lenses. There are some advanced lens polymers out there, like Trivex, which I believe is both impact resistant and has very good optical quality, but these are more expensive, and not typically used in safety glasses. The most common lens polymer is CR-39 which has good optical quality, but is not impact resistant, so I never recommend it for shooting.
2. Correct focal point of a lens is what it takes to shift your relaxed focal point from infinity to the hyperfocal point of the front sight. For smallbore or other long sight radius rifles, this is an addition of +0.50 diopters to any distance correction you have, or just a +0.50 lens if you have zero distance correction, or else a +0.75 diopter for short sight radius like an AR, or a pistol. This is true even if you have perfect 20/20 vision. Remember, 20/20 is a measure of your eye's ability to focus at 20 feet (which is about the same as infinity for optics). However for shooting, you do not want to focus at infinity, you want to focus at a point which is the optical average between focusing on the front sight, and focusing on the target - aka the 'hyperfocal distance' of the front sight. Since this distance is closer than infinity, you want a +0.50 diopter lens, even if you have perfect distance vision. Reading glasses are too strong. The weakest power you can typically buy is +1.25 diopters which is too strong, and will bring your focal point so close that you get a great front sight, but the target is blurry. You want to gain all the focus you can on the front sight while giving up the least amount on the target, so you can see both at the same time.
3. Glass is a bad option for several reasons. First is that it needs to be safety rated / tempered to be impact resistant, so it gets very thick. Second is that every lens surface reflects some amount of light. For glass, it is about 5%, so a lens (2 surfaces - front and back) will lose 10% of transmitted light. They make anti-reflective coatings to reduce this loss, but those get expensive, especially on glass lenses. Polycarbonate is not only impact resistant, but also inherently blocks 99% of UV light, and only has a reflective loss of 0.75%, so transmitted loss is on the order of 1.5%. And since these lenses are made in bulk, and have AR coating added in bulk, the addition of AR coating is cheap to make, and will reduce the transmitted loss down to something like 0.2% (not sure that eye docs pass that savings on though).
4. Eyeglass lenses typically come with a vapor deposition of a glass like hardcoat. This is like the shell on a hardboiled egg. It stands up well to abrasion, and minor impacts. Ultimately, its strength is limited by the relatively softer polymer lens, so if you really ding it, it will scratch, but for daily washings and dirt and being put on a table, these coatings resist scratches pretty well.
5. Fogging. Fogging sucks, there is no way around it. However you can minimize it. Get a bar of soap, wet it, rub your finger around to get gooey soap on your finger, and wipe it all over the inside of the lens. Let it dry. Then buff it with a cloth till the lens is clear. This will keep it from fogging for the better part of the day. Put more on the next morning. Specific products like Cat Crap exist, but these are really just soft soap. The only benefit I see in them is that they come in a plastic jar so you can store them in your shooting gear.
6. Optical alignment. Lowest optical distortion comes from (a) looking through the center of a lens, and (b) looking perpendicular through the lens. Some of the high price shooting glasses are all over advertising that they move the center of the lens to work better for shooters, and that's all good. However they fail to mention the perpendicular bit, because fixed frame glasses cannot fix this problem, so they would rather you didn't know about it. When you shoot prone, your line of sight is at a pretty strong angle to the lens when you look through the upper inside corner. Unfortunately, this is the corner that has the worst air circulation behind the lens, so it usually also fogs first.
7. Lens quality. Polycarbonate lenses are molded, not ground. The quality of the mold will determine the quality of the lens. Eyeglass quality lenses are really good, hardware store $4 safety glasses might not be as good, so you cannot necessarily assume that polycarbonate is bad - cheap safety glasses might be bad. That said, the mold is usually a 1-time up front cost for suppliers, so spending a little extra to get a good quality mold is a good investment, and I'd assume that the big brands, like Uvex, will make decent quality PC safety glasses. NOTE, real safety glasses have the code Z87 molded into them. THere are several flavors of Z87, usually Z87.1, sometiimes they have the year molded in, as the Z87 standard has been modified over time. Also note, there is Z87 which is basic protection, and Z87+, which has a higher impact rating.
8. Keeping your shooting glass lenses scratch free. Drink Crown Royal. This whiskey not only guarantees your vision will be fuzzy, so you cannot see the small scratches in your glasses, but it also comes in a really nice fuzzy purple cloth bag, which is ideal for storing safety glasses so they don't get scratched.
In the interest of transparency (no pun intended) (ok, I lie, I knew that was a pun), I make and sell a lot of the products I talk about here - I have gotten a safety glass company to mold me special safety glasses for shooters with +0.50 and +0.75 in the lenses, I do make custom lenses for people, etc, etc. However, in case someone feels I might be presenting arguments that are self interested, I'd offer that the laws of optical physics are difficult to mis-represent, just to make a sale :-).
1. The abbe value discussion is a red herring in most cases. Abbe value measures the ability of a lens to refract light as a function of frequency. This is why a prism creates a rainbow, because blue light is refracted a different amount than red light, so incident white light becomes a rainbow. Poor abbe value creates wider rainbows than good abbe values. However abbe errors are cosine dependent, and become zero when you look perpendicularly through a lens - you only get them as the light entering the lens starts to become parallel to the lens surface. For everyday glasses, polycarbonate might cause some rainbow fringing way out at the periphery of your view, but for looking at sight alignment which is reasonably in front of you, the error is smaller than your eye can resolve. For prone shooting, where you look at the extreme upper inside corner of glasses, a slight amount of rainbow fringing could become detectable with flat lenses, however for that type of shooting people often use Knobloch or similar glasses so they can re-align the lens with the direction of their view, or use wrapped lenses. There are some advanced lens polymers out there, like Trivex, which I believe is both impact resistant and has very good optical quality, but these are more expensive, and not typically used in safety glasses. The most common lens polymer is CR-39 which has good optical quality, but is not impact resistant, so I never recommend it for shooting.
2. Correct focal point of a lens is what it takes to shift your relaxed focal point from infinity to the hyperfocal point of the front sight. For smallbore or other long sight radius rifles, this is an addition of +0.50 diopters to any distance correction you have, or just a +0.50 lens if you have zero distance correction, or else a +0.75 diopter for short sight radius like an AR, or a pistol. This is true even if you have perfect 20/20 vision. Remember, 20/20 is a measure of your eye's ability to focus at 20 feet (which is about the same as infinity for optics). However for shooting, you do not want to focus at infinity, you want to focus at a point which is the optical average between focusing on the front sight, and focusing on the target - aka the 'hyperfocal distance' of the front sight. Since this distance is closer than infinity, you want a +0.50 diopter lens, even if you have perfect distance vision. Reading glasses are too strong. The weakest power you can typically buy is +1.25 diopters which is too strong, and will bring your focal point so close that you get a great front sight, but the target is blurry. You want to gain all the focus you can on the front sight while giving up the least amount on the target, so you can see both at the same time.
3. Glass is a bad option for several reasons. First is that it needs to be safety rated / tempered to be impact resistant, so it gets very thick. Second is that every lens surface reflects some amount of light. For glass, it is about 5%, so a lens (2 surfaces - front and back) will lose 10% of transmitted light. They make anti-reflective coatings to reduce this loss, but those get expensive, especially on glass lenses. Polycarbonate is not only impact resistant, but also inherently blocks 99% of UV light, and only has a reflective loss of 0.75%, so transmitted loss is on the order of 1.5%. And since these lenses are made in bulk, and have AR coating added in bulk, the addition of AR coating is cheap to make, and will reduce the transmitted loss down to something like 0.2% (not sure that eye docs pass that savings on though).
4. Eyeglass lenses typically come with a vapor deposition of a glass like hardcoat. This is like the shell on a hardboiled egg. It stands up well to abrasion, and minor impacts. Ultimately, its strength is limited by the relatively softer polymer lens, so if you really ding it, it will scratch, but for daily washings and dirt and being put on a table, these coatings resist scratches pretty well.
5. Fogging. Fogging sucks, there is no way around it. However you can minimize it. Get a bar of soap, wet it, rub your finger around to get gooey soap on your finger, and wipe it all over the inside of the lens. Let it dry. Then buff it with a cloth till the lens is clear. This will keep it from fogging for the better part of the day. Put more on the next morning. Specific products like Cat Crap exist, but these are really just soft soap. The only benefit I see in them is that they come in a plastic jar so you can store them in your shooting gear.
6. Optical alignment. Lowest optical distortion comes from (a) looking through the center of a lens, and (b) looking perpendicular through the lens. Some of the high price shooting glasses are all over advertising that they move the center of the lens to work better for shooters, and that's all good. However they fail to mention the perpendicular bit, because fixed frame glasses cannot fix this problem, so they would rather you didn't know about it. When you shoot prone, your line of sight is at a pretty strong angle to the lens when you look through the upper inside corner. Unfortunately, this is the corner that has the worst air circulation behind the lens, so it usually also fogs first.
7. Lens quality. Polycarbonate lenses are molded, not ground. The quality of the mold will determine the quality of the lens. Eyeglass quality lenses are really good, hardware store $4 safety glasses might not be as good, so you cannot necessarily assume that polycarbonate is bad - cheap safety glasses might be bad. That said, the mold is usually a 1-time up front cost for suppliers, so spending a little extra to get a good quality mold is a good investment, and I'd assume that the big brands, like Uvex, will make decent quality PC safety glasses. NOTE, real safety glasses have the code Z87 molded into them. THere are several flavors of Z87, usually Z87.1, sometiimes they have the year molded in, as the Z87 standard has been modified over time. Also note, there is Z87 which is basic protection, and Z87+, which has a higher impact rating.
8. Keeping your shooting glass lenses scratch free. Drink Crown Royal. This whiskey not only guarantees your vision will be fuzzy, so you cannot see the small scratches in your glasses, but it also comes in a really nice fuzzy purple cloth bag, which is ideal for storing safety glasses so they don't get scratched.
In the interest of transparency (no pun intended) (ok, I lie, I knew that was a pun), I make and sell a lot of the products I talk about here - I have gotten a safety glass company to mold me special safety glasses for shooters with +0.50 and +0.75 in the lenses, I do make custom lenses for people, etc, etc. However, in case someone feels I might be presenting arguments that are self interested, I'd offer that the laws of optical physics are difficult to mis-represent, just to make a sale :-).
Last edited by ShootingSight on Wed Jul 29, 2015 9:18 am, edited 2 times in total.
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David Levene
- Posts: 5617
- Joined: Mon Mar 01, 2004 12:49 pm
- Location: Ruislip, UK
Re: Non-perscription shooting glasses recommendations?
Not certain that I understand your comment unless, of course, you are saying that "high price" does not always equal "high quality".ShootingSight wrote:6 Optical alignment. Lowest optical distortion comes from (a) looking through the center of a lens, and (b) looking perpendicular through the lens. Some of the high price shooting glasses are all over advertising that they move the center of the lens to work better for shooters, and that's all good. However they fail to mention the perpendicular bit, because fixed frame glasses cannot fix this problem, so they would rather you didn't know about it.
Certainly frames like Champion allow you to adjust the lens so that it is perpendicular to the line of sight.
The big difficulty there however is that, because the adjustment pivot is at the edge of the lens (or beyond), they can alter the distance of the optical centre of the lens from the eye. With higher strength lenses that changes the effective strength of the lens and throws the standardised +0.5 (rifle) and +0.75(pistol) adjustment out of the window.