Trifocals…Really?

Trifocal Lenses in Derry, Windham, & Londonderry, NH

All of us have heard about bifocals and their segmented design: a lens split cleanly with a definitive line marking the different prescriptions for farsightedness and close reading. While they get a bad rap, bifocals can be genuinely helpful for most people who need them, and they can be a great solution to those with presbyopia. But what if they just don’t cut it? The problem with bifocals is that they only target two vision areas, near and far, and can leave some things in the middle blurry. Spindel Eye Associates wants to tell you about a great solution: trifocals.

Trifocals vs. bifocals

Bifocals are some of the most common prescription glasses sold around the world. They help correct presbyopia, a condition generally brought on by natural aging, where you begin to lose your ability to clearly see things that are close. They come in different styles and lens designs, where the prescriptions take up different areas of the lens. For instance, executive bifocals—or the Franklin bifocal, as they’re sometimes called—split the two prescriptions in a straight line all the way across, not quite halfway up the lens. However, the biggest issue with bifocals is that they can leave things in between the near and far prescriptions blurry and unfocused.

With trifocals, the lenses in your glasses have three prescriptions: near, far, and intermediate. The intermediate prescription can be placed in a few different places on your lens to accommodate your vision needs and preferences, and it allows you to see more comfortably in a way that’s more similar to your natural eyesight before the presbyopia set in.

While bifocals limit your view of the world into two distances and a blurred middle, trifocals allow you a full range of sight at all distances. They give you a sight that is more natural than bifocals do because they allow for a broader range of depth and clarity, while maintaining your peripheral vision.

Trifocal designs

In every pair of trifocals, the intermediate segment is situated directly above the near power segment. The intermediate segment uses about half of the magnifying power of the near segment, allowing you to see things a bit further away that would still be blurred by the distant segment. Trifocal lenses come in two different layouts, giving you the freedom to choose which one gives you the optimum visual results you need. The flat-top trifocal lens is perhaps the most popular, and it fits the near and intermediate segments into a neat D-shape. This allows for good peripheral vision as it doesn’t span across the whole of the lens, and it’s an easy design to get used to. The executive trifocal lens is similar to the executive bifocals in that the prescriptions span all the way across the lens. The intermediate segment is thinner than the other segments on this design, but it allows a broader range of corrected vision.

Using our knowledge and experience, Spindel Eye Associates can help you choose a design that works best for you.

See more with trifocals from Spindel Eye Associates.