How to choose your polarized fly fishing eye glasses

0 No tags Permalink

These days you will find polarized eye glasses all over: from big supermarket shops to super expensive dedicated stores. There are plenty of models in different colors and shapes, from known and expensive brands to no-name ones.

How to choose the proper polarized eye glasses is very important otherwise you can damaged your eye sight for a short period of time, long time or even forever!

Eye sight is the most important human sense and like for everybody, a fisherman should know how to protect his eyes. A good pair of eyeglasses will make you feel better in strong sun and see better in almost all light conditions.

The most easy way to find if your eyeglasses are ok is to feel comfortable wearing them. If you have headache then you should stop using those eyeglasses!

Headache is induced by tight frames or by lenses with geometrical aberration. A geometrical aberration means a lens that has not a homogeneous composition and has distortions. That means an extra effort for eye to stay focused. If you wear these kind of eye glasses for a long time is highly possible to finish with a visit at optician. A prescription of a permanent of reading glasses will follow without any doubt.

I’m engineer in physics and I studied optics as specialty for a year. I had the pleasure to work in a lab and to build lenses 🙂 So here is a simple example way about how to check your polarized eye glasses and to avoid these kind of problems:

  • wear a pair of polarized eye glasses
  • put in front of you the eyeglasses that you want to test
  • turn them at 90 degrees

If they look like those bellow, means that are bad:

These eyeglasses have the lenses deformed by too tight frames. These frames put a static tension in lenses and physical deformation occur.

If they look like the following way , means that are good because the frames and the lenses fit well.

The first good ones are yellow, the second ones are colored in amber.

There are 2 simple ways to test the polarization of glasses: rotate the eyeglasses in front of other polarized eyeglasses at 90 degrees and if they go black or very dark means that are very good. If they go only a little bit darker means that are not so fantastic.

Another way is to wear the eyeglasses and to rotate your phone in front of you at 90 degrees.

If the screen of your phone goes darker, then the eyeglasses are doing their job:)

Attention, the polarization factor has nothing to do with the quality of lenses. The polarization property is coming from a special coating applied on the lenses.

You can find good eyeglasses with good lenses but with bad polarization properties and vice versa .

Colored lenses are very important not because they are cool or can relax your eyes. The colors work as a filters and will select the wave-light that will pas thru to your eyes. A proper color according with background color ( wich often is green from trees and grass ) will give you a good contrast needed to spot easily the fly and the fish.

UV factor and how your polarized lenses is filtering this type of light is very important: bad UV lenses will cause injury to your eyes. It is very difficult to measure how your eyeglasses are filtering the UV light. But I will talk in a next article about colors and UV protection, properties that are a must for a good pair of eyeglasses and of course, for your eyes.

No Comments Yet.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *