Blog
From the lab
Notes from the lab floor for eye care professionals: lenses, progressives and running a practice's lab work.
· Progressives
Free-form progressive lenses: what to put on the order
Free-form progressives are cut for one prescription, so the order carries more weight. What the lab needs from you: monocular PD, fitting height, a tracing.
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· Lab
Progressive lens manufacturing: the seven stations
From order to shipping box, the seven stations a progressive lens passes through in our lab, what each machine does to the lens, and where it gets checked.
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· Ordering
How to switch optical labs without losing a week
Switching labs with jobs still out? Open the account, send a test job or two, run both labs side by side, and tell the front desk which lab has which job.
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· Lab
Independent wholesale optical labs vs corporate labs
Flat rate or a line item for every prism? What changes when your lab is independent: pricing, where the job is made, and who answers when you call.
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· Lab
Lens edging: edge in-house or send it finished?
What edging a lens takes, what an in-house edger costs you in time, skill and remakes, which jobs to send out, and what the lab needs to edge them well.
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· Lenses
Lensometer guide for opticians: reading free-form lenses
Where to read distance power, prism and add on a free-form progressive, what the engravings locate, and why a compensated lens won't match the written Rx.
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· Lab
Optical lab remake rates, and our 0.48% return rate
A 0.48% return rate is fewer than 5 lenses back in every 1,000. Where remakes come from, and the numbers an optical manager should track each month.
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· Ordering
Optical lab turnaround: how many days by job type
Single vision leaves ITFIT in 1-2 business days and progressives in 2-3. How business days, shipping and missing details add up to the date you promise.
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· Progressives
Progressive lens identifier: reading the markings
A patient's progressive, no record of the design. How to read the engravings, match them to an identification chart, and find the fitting cross.
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· Progressives
Progressive lens non-adaptation: what the lab can fix
When a patient can't adapt to progressives, the cause can be a measurement. What to check, which fixes the lab makes, and which ones start in your chair.
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· Lenses
Abbe value of lens materials: which one to order
CR-39, polycarbonate and 1.67 high-index compared by Abbe value and specific gravity, what each number means for the patient, and when to order each.
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· Coatings
Anti-reflective coating lenses: ordering AR from a lab
What AR does to the light, why it needs a hard coat under it, how to tell coating failure from a scratch, and what to write on the order.
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Want this kind of answer on your own job?
Call the lab and ask. We would rather talk a prescription through than remake it.