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Most practices have the same tech now, all the high st options are up to date and even the small branches have invested heavily in some fancy new stuff up here. I’m sticking by my statement
konastab01-
The tech may be the same but the individual doing it plays a huge part in the confidence you feel in the result (and can influence the result itself, either in how they listen to your answers or in how they choose to interpret the numbers before filling out the prescription).
I had two eye tests on successive days a month or so ago, one at my local Specsavers (chosen because the fancy OCT scan was only an extra tenner) and one at Ace & Tate in Covent Garden (chosen because they were free). Having had the same distance prescription for 20ish years I knew damn well I was getting age-related presbyopia (arms too short to read unless I took my glasses off) and was expecting to have a discussion about varifocals.
In Specsavers, I felt I was being passed from one person to another with no explanation of who anyone was (one person did the OCT scan and a couple of other tests, then another did the 'is it better with one ... or with two ...' that I think of as a traditional eye test), then after sitting for a while waiting for the second person to come back to me to discuss the prescription, a third came up to me with 'so, we're going to look at varifocals.' Er, no, I haven't yet talked through what I want, or my needs, or the disadvantages of varifocals against separate reading and distance specs, or indeed whether I should just keep on taking my glasses off to read.
The following day in Ace and Tate most of the kit looked identical (no OCT gear though), but it was one person who took me through all of the tests (resulting in a slightly different prescription to the day before), and had time to discuss options at the end. He then passed me over to a colleague to look at frames (not that I liked any of them), but that was at least an explicit handover, and while I still wasn't sure what I wanted to end up with I had a much clearer idea of what to think about.
I'm sure either prescription will result in acceptable vision correction, but I'm left with far more confidence in one practice than in the other.
jsabine
This is not right. They’re not all the same at all.