Benefits of digital eye exam?

February 20, 2019 9:31 AM

I’ve worn glasses for 30 years and I always have difficulty adjusting to a new prescription and new frames. I’ve only ever had traditional eye exams. If you’re like me and you’ve gotten instead a digital eye exam, we’re you pleased with the results?

I feel like I get lost in the comparisons inherent in a traditional eye exam—which is better, A or B? C or D? A or D? I’m curious to try an alternative that takes my judgments (or growing impatience/frustration with the process) out of the equation.

If you are a longtime glasses wearer—particularly if you have had trouble adjusting to new Rx, has getting a digital exam (e.g., Clarifye) improved your experience?

posted by Admiral Haddock to Health & Fitness (5 answers total)

I used opternative, and it was fine- but it was just as fiddly as any other exam. You still look at blurry stuff and differently blurry stuff, and have to make a judgement.

I switched to a human optometrist for my last exam, just so I could do the eye health checkup part (glaucoma, diabetes, etc).

One strategy that I've been following is keeping my old prescriptions on file and trying to understand the degree to which my eyes have been changing at each exam- if the online prescription is pretty close to what you'd expect from tracking the trendline, then it's probably fine.
posted by jenkinsEar at 9:48 AM on February 20, 2019

The place I used to go that had a machine only used it as a starting point for a traditional fitting. It made the process faster, but there was still a bit of “A or B” at the end.
posted by fedward at 9:51 AM on February 20, 2019 [1 favorite]

I'm not positive what a "digital eye exam" is, but at my last eye doctor appointment, instead of using a manual machine with little lenses they put in and took out, they had my look in to a "digital" machine, that quickly flipped through the lenses instead of the person manually doing it.

The major difference was that instead of the "A or B" bit, they could put them both visible at once. "Which one is more clear, top or bottom?". I liked that a lot. It makes it way easier to tell.
posted by bbqturtle at 11:39 AM on February 20, 2019 [3 favorites]

Ditto the uncertainty of what constitutes a digital eye exam, but my current optometrist has a fancy eye photographing machine, which you can use instead of the dilation drops (and at an extra expense to me, the customer, but I appreciate not having to squint at all bright lights for a few hours) to look into your eyes. After using that machine, he then had me use the usual "old tech" for A or B visual preferences, and I asked him if there wasn't something newer to use. His answer was that the new systems aren't any better or easier than the old system.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:52 AM on February 20, 2019

As a note, it appears that Clarifye is exclusive to optometrists associated with Lenscrafters. So unless you go to Lenscrafters for exams, it's less likely you've had a digital exam and very unlikely you had a Clarifye exam. Here's a review that makes it sound like what bbqturtle describes.
posted by Aleyn at 1:04 PM on February 20, 2019