Originally Posted by
jackb
More surprisingly is the price people pay for sunglasses in general. All you need is shaded lenses to get the benefit. Everything else is mostly hype and marketing. But folks like what they like, so no big deal.
As I mentioned in another thread about sunglasses a couple of years ago:
Back when I was still working in a bike store, our shop's Oakley rep occasionally brought around a simple demo apparatus that tested the distortion or lack thereof in lenses.
He took a couple of pairs of the other (expensive) brands of sunglasses we stocked and stuck them in the tester, which beamed a laser-like shaft of light through the center of the lens. With the light shining through each of the other brands' lenses at the beam's target, the resulting illumination was soft and diffuse.
Then the Oakley lens, and the beam was as tight and coherent. Think of the different settings of flashlights: that's what the comparison was like.
The testing setup couldn't have been simpler, and the superiority of the Oakley lens was glaringly obvious. No pun intended.