Eyepiece correction lenses - any spectacles wearers use them?

Glenn

Glenn

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I am preparing my newly acquired vintage SLR for its first outing.

It is a (very) long time since I used one and in the meantime I have started to wear varifocal glasses. My digital camera has a knob on the side which allows me to adjust the dioptre-age of the viewfinder and I simply remove my glasses to use it. That works well for me.

I have a couple of options with the SLR. One is to put a rubber eye cup on the viewfinder and to use my reading glasses but clearly it's a faff to keep swapping specs.

The other is to part with £25 for an eye correction lens screwed to the eyepiece which will clearly work but I won't be able to get such a lens bang on prescription (I need +2.75 dioptres and the closest is +3.00).

The third is to add an eyecup and a +0.50 dioptre correction lens which will make the top of my varifocals into reading specs. The only issue here is that I really need +0.25 dioptre.

Guessing others have been there before me so I thought I'd ask how to approach the issue.
 
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Glen, I need glasses for reading and another pair for distance. For several years I needed to be wearing the distance glasses to see things sharp in the viewfinder of my OM1 cameras. I didn't like this, even with an eyecup. So I got my optician to sell me a lens with the same spec. as the one in the right eye of my distance glasses, having first established that it would be plastic. It was an easy job to cut a rectangle out of this and file the edges until it was a tight fit in the eyepiece of the OM1. It worked really well. It was actually quite cost effective because the circular lens supplied was about 50mm in diameter and I actually cut four rectangles out of the central section. Enough for my two OM1 cameras, a Pentax MX that a friend gave me, plus one spare.

Alan
 
I normally used to wear bifocals but recently I have found I can dispense with the long distance lens except at night and now only use distance lenses for night time and a cheap pair of reading glasses when I need to.
 
I’m right at the limit of the diopter adjustment on my digital Canon camera. It had it also on the old analog F1n so it’s not just modern ones that do it. I like the idea of cutting up a glades lens to fit once it gets that bad
 
Glenn said:
I am preparing my newly acquired vintage SLR for its first outing.

It is a (very) long time since I used one and in the meantime I have started to wear varifocal glasses. My digital camera has a knob on the side which allows me to adjust the dioptre-age of the viewfinder and I simply remove my glasses to use it. That works well for me.

I have a couple of options with the SLR. One is to put a rubber eye cup on the viewfinder and to use my reading glasses but clearly it's a faff to keep swapping specs.

The other is to part with £25 for an eye correction lens screwed to the eyepiece which will clearly work but I won't be able to get such a lens bang on prescription (I need +2.75 dioptres and the closest is +3.00).

The third is to add an eyecup and a +0.50 dioptre correction lens which will make the top of my varifocals into reading specs. The only issue here is that I really need +0.25 dioptre.

Guessing others have been there before me so I thought I'd ask how to approach the issue.
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I have found that some camera's have a built in adjustment diopter that needs to be accounted for in the calculations, Leica M for example is preset to -0.5. Its also worth noting that the calculations are based on the virtual focus distance for your eye the camera assumes, this may be different to your normal glasses prescription. The thing to remember is that you rarely use the viewfinder continuously for long periods of time so your eyes can probably accommodate a less than perfect prescription match.

I would recommend ordering a few strength different correction lenses and see the one that gives the best results, returning the others. For me the best one was different to the calculation method.
 
When I bought my lens from the optician (Specsavers) I took my OM1 camera in, explained what I wanted, and they took a reading through the viewfinder, then worked out what lens I needed. I was being tested for new glasses at the time....

Alan
 
Thanks Ian. The construction of the Nikon F is such that the correction lens looks straight onto the pentaprism. The camera came with a screw-in +1.0 dioptre lens. If I remove that lens and look through the viewfinder then the image is useably in-focus with my glasses on. It has better focus with the reading part of the varifocal so at least I have a starting point. The difference between the two is +0.25 dioptre (according to my prescription) which kind of matches up with the default you mentioned.

I am warming to Alan's idea though as I can get the exact strength and my specs have a cylindrical off-axis correction which wouldn't be accounted for in a commercial correction lens.
 
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