Dual Eyewear produces a range of bifocal eyewear for riders in a variety of styles and these are the slightly more ‘rad’ Q9 model featuring removable arms, internal cushioning and elastic strap to convert them to pseudo goggles. Whatever the style you opt for they all feature bifocal lenses that come in a range of diopters (+1.5 to +2.5) for mountain biking Mr. Magoos.
The bottom edges of the non-prescription tinted lenses feature a small, magnified window, designed to clarify things in the bottom of your vision. What they’re intended for is where riders are happy to ride without glasses – a thing that the long sighted in particular are happier to do – but they still want to be able to read text on their phone, Garmin or bike computer.
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They save you having to either ride with your glasses on and look like an amateur [like me then – Ed] or have to pop in some contacts just for the ride (it took me 20 years of bespectacled existence to pluck up the courage to finally touch my own eyeball). And despite the strangeness of having the lower part of your vision in sharp focus while the rest is not, owing to the way you ride with your head down and eyes up, you soon forget about the weird sharpness going on in the lower part of your view. In fact the only time you become aware of the lower bifocal view is when you stop and actually look down at your phone or, more importantly, the menu at the mid-ride café stop.
Overall: Styling aside, they do work and if you are a glasses wearer they are a lot cheaper than a prescription pair of dedicated riding specs.
