The base, regular Wayfarers were cannibalized and cheapened out by Luxottica a long time ago. I'm fortunate enough to have a vintage pair from the mid-1980's that still look brand new. They have higher quality zyl frames, polarized glass Bausch & Lomb lenses, and, crucially, five barrel bolted hinges. They're built like a tank.
The new ones are so cheap I won't even wear them. Cheap plastic, plastic lenses, spring hinges that break quickly, and obnoxious branding on both the temples and the lenses. Terrible.
I work in the optical industry. I do R&D/quality control for a lens manufacturer and agree Luxottica is an awful company, but your comment is way off base. It's actually quite wrong.
Your "zyl" acetate frames aren't higher quality. Modern acetate is stronger, lighter, less brittle, less subject to warping from temperature change, and more resistant to UV damage which impacts brittleness and color. 40 years of material science progress. No one in the industry would say older acetate is better. It's worse in every way especially because yours are old. They're breaking down.
People don't wear glass lenses anymore for a reason. They are heavy and the only advantage over plastic is less chromatic aberration which is a non issue unless you are comparing to an extreme prescription using high-index plastic. They are also fairly dangerous compared to plastic due to the way they shatter. They fog up more easily. Again, 40 years of material science.
Additionally, there are no low optical-quality plastic lens blanks. This is a solved problem. The only defects you'll get in lens blanks are bubbles and these won't make it through production. What happens after a manufacturer grinds the lens out is a different story but I can also tell you that their lens surfacing is not low quality by any means.
Your hinges aren't any better and get loose over time. You can't actually use these for 40 years, they will wear out too and are harder to replace. Spring loaded hinges are lighter and reduce strain on both the frames and the wearer. I know what they use, they aren't cheap, and are high quality.
I do agree with your point on the branding.
The optimization for optics is all about weight. Your old frames and lenses aren't better because they're heavier, they're worse. As well as being more brittle and shatterable. It's like pining for the old heavy golf clubs made of wood and iron or all steel cars with V8 engines. Yeah, they're heavier! But they're worse in every way.
I will also say that you should buy frames because you like the frames. If you want great lenses, you just get them made. You shouldn't expect high-quality prescription lenses from a frame manufacturer, that's what your optometrist is for. I buy cheap frames all the time and pop in whatever I want.
You may have a bit of a point if you are talking moderate to high prescription ordered from Ray-Ban, but if you are talking about their non-prescriptive sunglasses, you're just yelling about all the wrong things.
Edit: typo and swapped in "surfacing" rather than "production" for clarity.
++ I wear prescription Ray-Ban Wayfarers and they're highly durable and the lenses are pretty good quality. I use them out gardening and when working in the yard. In general I only wear Ray Bans because they're a pretty consistent quality, durable, very lightweight, and never pinch my nose.
> They are heavy and the only advantage over plastic is less chromatic aberration which is a non issue unless you are comparing to an extreme prescription using high-index plastic.
This isn't true, even the best plastic lenses of 2023 are nowhere near as scratch resistant as the best glass lenses of 1993.
I used to have Ray-Bans, but only buy Maui Jims these days. I tried Revos, which I had always thought of as very high-quality, but they were not good (lenses reflected lots of light from behind me, as if they lacked an anti-reflective coating).
But even some MJs are not as good as the price would suggest. I have tried $300 MJs that didn't have spring hinges. They were just like regular lousy hinges.
Costco has a selection of Maui Jim sunglasses for ~$100, which is far below retail.
First of all, nobody (certainly not me) is "yelling." I find the way you wrote this response a bit telling, and that sort of thing actually detracts from your ability to persuade.
I'd freely grant your point about the zyl. But the rest of your response is somewhat motte-and-bailey fallacy to me. For instance, I never maintained that there are "low quality plastic lens blanks." What I was getting at is that for a lot of consumers, the polarized Bausch & Lomb glass lenses are superior in quality and a better experience than the cheap plastic lenses. I also never, at any point, maintained that
I'd "expect high-quality prescription lenses from a frame manufacturer." My comment was framed (pun intended) in terms of off-the-rack, non-Rx sunglasses which was absolutely clear from what I said above.
And your claim about the hinges is simply laughable. I'd dare you to stress-test (in the R&D sense) the old five-barrel bolted hinges against these cheap spring hinges. That's a Pepsi challenge I'd be willing to take any day. Incidentally, as I mentioned above, I have a pair of 1984 Ray-Ban Wayfarer IIs that are a few months away from being exactly 40 years old, and as I said they look and function like new even though they've been worn constantly for decades. Trying to maintain that the spring hinges Luxottica uses on today's Ray-Ban branded sunglasses are "high quality" completely destroys the force of your argument.
Assuming both commenters are honest, I'm going to listen to the person who works in QA in the industry.
The parent just sounds like someone who loves a specific item and is a bit miffed they changed it.
Lots of "cheap plastic lenses" and "cheap spring hinges" type complaints without much backup.
Is carbon fiber cheap and rubbish because it isn't steel? Why does the parent think plastic means inferior?
"Mine are 40 years old and fine!!" Is a bit useless, and a sample of one.
I own a wide range of old and new sunglasses, and in my eyes, the new ones are mostly superior if you buy right. Granted Luxottica are a bad actor in many ways.
"... destroys the force of your argument ..." really? Does it? Does it tho? No.
This is just industry entrenchment. Owning a pair of old vs new raybans just doesn't compare, it's not just the weight. The springs and material are simply stronger, they don't break or get scuffed as easily. The new lenses may have some better technical properties in the lab or extreme settings but the biggest difference is just keeping them smudge free. Old lenses just stay clean and are so much easier to simply wipe down. The new ones are nearly impossible to clean without chemicals and seem to get dirty almost immediately.
The bit about cars is telling too. Yes new cars are better in everyway on paper and in extreme cases. But from an actual consumer usage standpoint it's not the always better... $3500 repair because I bumped a guardrail on the highway one night vs some touchup paint in an older car. High speed collision, sure new car is preferred.
No one at a marina is going to try and sell you on a 1980s Yamaha 2-Stroke vs the new EFI 4 Strokes, but anyone that owns both would tell you they just wish they made a few improvements to the old style instead of going completely modern. Of course the new motor makes 30 more HP and uses less fuel but it needs vastly more maintenance and you need an entire parts store to have a reasonable chance of avoiding being stranded.
The improvements are great, but for most things, for most people, they just want them to work well for their intended typical usage.
It's wonderful the new F225s can operate in 9ft swells at 0F but I would really just like it to have a greater than 50% chance of starting up in calm 75 degree weather which is like 90% of the time I'm boating.
You know the dealers recommendations though, and I'm not joking, is just buy two (or more) motors!
Are you seriously claiming that plastic lenses are higher quality and longer lasting than glass lenses? Plastic lenses scratch very easily; glass lenses don't. Also, I don't need to write a white paper or do a study to maintain that spring hinges are cheap compared to the barrel hinges. I've seen so many of the spring hinges break on glasses people had bought less than a year ago. They are demonstrably low quality.
Do you mean crown glass? High index glass? Polycarbonate?
What grade of scratch? What about cost to replace vs non-resistance? What about the average lifetime of glasses vs cost?
By cheap do you mean take less stress before fracture? How about actuations before failure?
See, you don't know. You're just ranting. Yes, you would need to you know ... at least cite some specifics and evidence beyond your own experience. That's how these things tend to work.
This is just meaningless overqualification, as if you're trying to escape reality. Any kind of glass is going to be more resistant to scratches than plastic, even the kind that claims to be scratch-resistant. By cheap hinges, I mean they take less stress before fracture and fewer actuations before failure.
This is really not rocket surgery. We're talking about sunglasses. As I said above, I don't need to write a white paper or do an academic study to know this is true, it's based on my experiences wearing all these different types of sunglasses over decades and observing how they are constructed and how they respond to various types of normal wear to outright abuse.
I find both comments pretty insightful and have a hard time disagreeing with either. It's nice that the poster you're replying to has deep knowledge about these glasses, but it doesn't actually change the way you feel about a sturdier-feeling product. And, sure, maybe you treat them really carefully, but the fact that they're 40 years old at least proves SOMETHING about them.
Sometimes things that "feel" high-quality are actually less robust, but longevity is not always more important than aesthetics.
> It's nice that the poster you're replying to has deep knowledge about these glasses, but it doesn't actually change the way you feel about a sturdier-feeling product.
This is the entire basis of Beats putting chunks of shitty iron in their headphones. It does absolutely nothing for the audio quality, but it makes them feel heavier and therefore people will swear up and down they are of better quality.
Part of being an intelligent person I feel is recognizing your own limitations, biases and failings. I am a very smart person, and I feel most people who know me would agree. But I am smart about particular things. I know a lot about my field of programming and I'm well educated in the software I make, and I know a lot about web development in a bit of an old school way (was educated formally awhile back, and while I can still sling PHP and use SQL with the best, I don't know nearly as much about newer frameworks and ways of doing things.) And while I'm proud of all that, it doesn't mean I know shitfuck about anything else.
I think a good part of what makes people intelligent is knowing what they know, knowing what they don't know, and being open to finding out if they need or want to from people who do know.
Listening to some of these arguments you'd believe we need to get an expert's opinion and a literature review to gauge the quality of the things we use in our daily lives.
I don't need an expert showing me a frequency curve to gauge the quality of earphones, I don't need an expert on manufacturing to tell me whether my current pair of glasses are more or less solid than the previous pair.
Part of being an intelligent person is also accepting that other people are just as intelligent as you, and not complete fools. People can see what's right in front of their eyes.
Oh man those Volvos from the 80s and 90s... I swear until a few years ago I heard people saying how they were the safest cars.
Or even my mum, I remember how she didn't like how the doors in the Sierra (an European Ford model) that my dad bought to replace an old Taunus (also an old European Ford model) were lighter, she felt less safe.
I once had a pair I found under a house from I’d guess the 60s, the builder must have misplaced them. They felt like something from another universe compared to today’s garbage.
The new ones are so cheap I won't even wear them. Cheap plastic, plastic lenses, spring hinges that break quickly, and obnoxious branding on both the temples and the lenses. Terrible.