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Prescription Shooting Glasses

• Availability - Not all manufacturers of shooting glasses offer models that can be produced with prescription lens, so your available choices may have already decreased. Only certain manufacturers have designs that will accept a prescription lens. Most of these manufacturers are on the higher end of the pricing spectrum so you end up paying more for the frames. Even inexpensive generic prescription safety glasses are difficult to find.

• Pricing - Most prescription shooting glasses lens have to be custom made by an optometrist or other eye care specialist. Anything with the word "custom" in it always comes at a higher price. During his search for prescription shooting glasses, Ed contacted Oakley and inquired about the price of a set of Oakley prescription shooting glasses. The quote: $385 with a 4-5 week turnaround time. Here's something else to consider, we talked about "Availability" above, right. Now figure that you had to pay more for a specialized frame that accepts prescription lens, and now you have to pay again for the lens themselves. This is getting to be a pretty expensive pair of glasses.

• Lens material - We've already talked about Polycarbonate as being the premier choice for lens material. Well the same features that make Polycarbonate so effective also makes it the most expensive lens material to work with. As a result, about 90% of the prescription shooting glasses produced today are made with CR 39 Plastic lens instead of polycarbonate. Although CR 39 Plastic is certainly better than no shooting glasses at all, I'd still rather have Polycarbonate as my lens.

Now how do you deal with all these additional issues?

Well, believe it or not, there is a way to get around these problems. It's a relatively new concept called "prescription inserts." Basically prescription inserts are prescription lens that are designed to mount inside of the glasses between the eyes and the glasses lens. They look something like this:

 

While this is a relatively new concept, not many manufacturers have caught on to it, and even fewer have integrated the concept into a well functional design. We do know of one manufacturer that has created an excellent design and incorporated a fully functional prescription insert at very reasonable pricing. Want to know who that manufacturer is?

Well take a look at the shooting glasses that we recommend