10 years ago I first blogged about getting glasses [1]. I’ve just ordered my 4th pair of glasses. When you buy new glasses the first step is to scan your old glasses to use that as a base point for assessing your eyes, instead of going in cold and trying lots of different lenses they can just try small variations on your current glasses. Any good optometrist will give you a print-out of the specs of your old glasses and your new prescription after you buy glasses, they may be hesitant to do so if you don’t buy because some people get a prescription at an optometrist and then buy cheap glasses online. Here are the specs of my new glasses, the ones I’m wearing now that are about 4 years old, and the ones before that which are probably about 8 years old:
| New | 4 Years Old | Really Old | |
|---|---|---|---|
| R-SPH | 0.00 | 0.00 | -0.25 |
| R-CYL | -1.50 | -1.50 | -1.50 |
| R-AXS | 180 | 179 | 180 |
| L-SPH | 0.00 | -0.25 | -0.25 |
| L-CYL | -1.00 | -1.00 | -1.00 |
| L-AXS | 5 | 10 | 179 |
The Specsavers website has a good description of what this means [2]. In summary SPH is whether you are log-sighted (positive) or short-sighted (negative). CYL is for astigmatism which is where the focal lengths for horizontal and vertical aren’t equal. AXS is the angle for astigmatism. There are other fields which you can read about on the Specsavers page, but they aren’t relevant for me.
The first thing I learned when I looked at these numbers is that until recently I was apparently slightly short-sighted. In a way this isn’t a great surprise given that I spend so much time doing computer work and very little time focusing on things further away. What is a surprise is that I don’t recall optometrists mentioning it to me. Apparently it’s common to become more long-sighted as you get older so being slightly short-sighted when you are young is probably a good thing.
Astigmatism is the reason why I wear glasses (the Wikipedia page has a very good explanation of this [3]). For the configuration of my web browser and GUI (which I believe to be default in terms of fonts for Debian/Unstable running KDE and Google-Chrome on a Thinkpad T420 with 1600×900 screen) I can read my blog posts very clearly while wearing glasses. Without glasses I can read it with my left eye but it is fuzzy and with my right eye reading it is like reading the last line of an eye test, something I can do if I concentrate a lot for test purposes but would never do by choice. If I turn my glasses 90 degrees (so that they make my vision worse not better) then my ability to read the text with my left eye is worse than my right eye without glasses, this is as expected as the 1.00 level of astigmatism in my left eye is doubled when I use the lens in my glasses as 90 degrees to it’s intended angle.
The AXS numbers are for the angle of astigmatism. I don’t know why some of them are listed as 180 degrees or why that would be different from 0 degrees (if I turn my glasses so that one lens is rotated 180 degrees it works in exactly the same way). The numbers from 179 degrees to 5 degrees may be just a measurement error.
Prescriptions don’t start at ‘0’ for astigmatism angles – the values range from 1 to 180. But yes, 0 and 180 would be the same.
Glenn: thanks for that. I guess it’s all arbitrary and they can make things up as they like. But 0 to 179 would make more sense than 1 to 180 to me.
The variation in the angle of astigmatism is measurement error (as you suspected). Or, at least that’s what the optometrist said when I asked in March.