Very quickly
1. I used -1.5 odd reading glasses and have done so for 3 years or so.
2. They cost c£5 off Ebay or similar
3. I’ve read that poor quality glasses are bad for your eyesight.
4. I don’t really want a £100 pair, but is there a middle ground? How much/where do I need to spend to hit some kind of value sweet spot.

Many thanks for advices

If you haven’t already just go and get them tested properly.

Pretty much all the high street opticians are open and do 2 for 1 offers for well under £100.00. Go for the basic glasses with no extras.

super thanks

Get a test / prescription and buy online. High street opticians make gouging amounts of profit.

I wear varifocal glasses and single vision contacts for riding/sport.

The contacts are set for my mid/long distance prescription but I can still read my phone/garmin fine with them in.

The optician said that for reading smaller print, like maps I was just as well buying a set of cheep magnifying reading glasses as there was no point in buying fancy readers for how often I would need to use them.

I bought some +1.5 readers from Boyes (I think) for under £5 and they’re absolutely fine, they’re not quite as comfy as my regular glasses but I’m happy to live with that as they were about 3% of the price.

I’ve read that poor quality glasses are bad for your eyesight.

Is this actually true? (not that you’ve read it, but that it is bad for you)

The cheap readers at Specsavers were 50 quid for 2 pairs, I dropped the frame after 12 months and it broke. Also, pretty awful fit so I didn’t like wearing them, they kept slipping down my nose.

So got the local indie optician to recut the lenses into the cheapest Oakley frames. 100 quid but so much better.

I’m just ordering some tinted optical lenses for a pair of old Ray Ban wayfarers I’ve had stored for years. £29 for the job done. It was only suggested to me yesterday to do this. The couple I know, buy used quality glasses like RayBan and Oakley, and just have lenses put in as and when.

My need for reading glasses was identified by an optician used by my employer and therefore with no need to sell me anything- she said get regular test but buy them cheap online

@nickjb I genuinely don’t know but this off the interweb

“Instead, many buy several cheap versions to stash around the house so that they can always find a pair.A researcher at consumer champion Which? checked 14 pairs from seven high street chains.

He found problems with half of them, with those carrying a higher prescription – +3.5 to +4 – considered to cause the most concern. ‘Off-the-peg glasses could cause eye strain, blurred vision, headaches or double vision,’ the Which? researcher said.

‘For people with higher prescriptions, they’re not suitable for walking or other mobile activities.’ They could even ‘cause a nasty accident’, he warned.

The biggest problem is that the centre point of the two lenses might not be aligned.

This means the sight in one eye might be clear while the other is blurred. This was the case in a pair from Poundland – which also had a prescription strength that differed from the +3.5 on the pack – and a £16 pair from fashion eyewear store Sight Station.”

Get a prescription for sure, mine has +1.5 for reading up and something else that affected long distance only*.

*I only found this out after buying a prescription pair (I now use off the shelf readers). I just about got an admission out of the optician.

Mine is coming up to be needing them for some TV stuff… going from phone/screen>TV some of the words are a bit/lot on the blurred side. I can hang out until a bit more of the Covid stuff has moved on, but it’s something that needs addressing at some stage.

I’m short sighted so wouldn’t in theory need reading glasses. But then I wear contact lenses, so when I have them in, have a cheap £10 pair of +2.0 specs from Matalan so I can read things like my phone, nutrition info on foodstuffs, that kind of thing.

I’m going to have cataract surgery in a couple of weeks, right eye first. So I’ll then need to wear a contact lens in my other eye only, and ready readers for reading. Surgeon says he’d like to do the other eye within a week or too so I’m not imbalanced for too long.
I won’t need the contact lenses at all after that, but will still need the ready readers. Ah well, you win some, lose some, eh?

I think I’ll get some stronger ones for the Christmas Airfix stuff, as anything smaller than 1/48 scale makes me want to learn Braille!

‘re the cutting of lenses and putting in nice frames, tk max often have discounted designer frames, doesn’t matter about the lenses as you are getting new ones put in. If the frames are cheap buy 2 then you have spares.

Then find a friendly local indie optician to recut your lenses. Mine does it foc if I buy the lenses from him.

I have done it a few times now, just avoid any curved frames, stick to flat fronted frames and the smaller the better.