I recently got a few pairs of glasses from the most common optical retailer with their best lenses (Ray Ban Rox Plus in sunglasses and BlueIQ in the regular ones). I have a light single vision prescription (about -1.5 sphere and -1 cyl in each eye) but still, I find these are not very good lenses -- I see plenty of chromatic aberration on the sides (I guess they're both made from polycarbonate where I'm more used to getting CR39 plastic) and they both appear to have other abberrations in the plastic that I can see when I pass different parts of the lens in front of my eye.

As a photographer, I'm really interested in having excellent optics in front of my eyes, but I don't know how to achieve it. I agree with the comments above -- it's sucky that you have to make full .25 incremental jumps, and that the axis for astigmatism is still determined by me having to say "1" looks better than "2" and "3" looks better than "4", all done with antiquated equipment manually operated when it should all be readable right off the retina.

Couple this with high pressure salesmanship and no transparency at all about the lenses and it is obvious why it's so hard for the consumer to get this right.

Yesterday I learned that Sam's Club offers Nikon, Zeiss and Seiko lenses. Some of my favorite glasses I got in Japan for $80 and they included standard Seikos with UV protection and great AR coating.