What is Anti-reflection coating on your lenses?

When you are buying lenses for your new spectacle, your optician must have suggested this name and advised you to go for Anti-reflection coating on your lenses.

Anti-reflection coating or ARC means it will fight unwanted reflections happening on your spectacle lenses. It is a coating done on your lenses to reduce reflection and improves transmission or transparency, hence it will result in more clarity and better Vision.

Other than visual benefits which wearer gets from this coating, it also adds the cosmetic feature because if there is no reflection on your lenses, Your Eyes are visible clearly hence better selfies (with a wink).

Pic courtesy: http://www.unsplash.com
  

In this image you see this beautiful girl wearing spectacle fitted with lenses without Anti-reflection coating and you can also notice reflections from the background image on lenses.

Let us now first understand the cause of reflections:

Spectacle lenses are manufactured using lens material. As a raw material, we use plastic (CR-39 or Polycarbonate ) or glasses ( not so common nowadays) as the lens material.

Each lens material has got few inherent properties like refractive index, impact resistance, abbe value, density and lens behavior wherein when light passes through the lens some get lost or reflected and rest of it is transmitted.

This reflected light causes annoyance and it happens on both front and back surface.

Light passing through the lens material

This graphic is showing some fraction of light getting reflected and the rest is passing.

Most of the available lens materials can transmit up to 92% of light whereas the remaining 8% get reflected, this reflection is 50%  higher in High index lens material. Which means High index material can reflect up to 12% thereby reducing transmission by another 4%.

A good ARC  can improve transmission up to 98% to 99% and modern-day ARC coating is developed with much higher strength and it doesn’t get scratch easily. ( click here to know more about the latest & toughest Anti-reflection coating.

Also, ARC with blue light protection is also available which can help you reduce exposure to harmful blue light and provide protection also.

So next time when you are selecting your spectacle lens don’t forget to ask more about Anti-reflection coating.

And get Clear Vision, better looks, more protection and durable lenses.

 

You can also watch this video to know more about different types of ARC.

https://youtu.be/ZJVoMnTHM4U