Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fezzik | Hacker News Reader

if you’re in to avoiding paying hyper-inflated costs to support entrenched and anticompetitive markets, like what eyeglsses have been for years, I higly recommend Zenni Optical. They have highly customizable options and are great glasses, especially for the price.

http://www.zennioptical.com

Edit: spelling

View on HN

My best experience to date for avoiding price-gouging has actually been at Costco's in-house optical.

My experience with Zenni was of the "you get what you pay for" variety.

So there is a market for a bit more expensive (say 70-100usd) glasses but with a better quality than Zenni.

Oh, wait that was Rayban and it was inhaled by the same company.

Same here. Zenni frames are cheap, and the lenses are pretty good. But the frames are built from cheap plastic, and so are the linkages, they just plate them with metallic coating. I've had the linkages break on 10+ pairs from fairly innocent things like falling asleep with them on.

They work fine, but it's like buying anything else designed to be disposable. Make sure you have a few pairs on hand for backup

I've had lots of Zenni frames and I've had exactly the opposite experience.

I sleep on them, drop them, subject them to all kinds of mistreatment, and they don't break!

Ok, they eventually break, but it takes a few years of mistreatment. I get my $12.95 out of them!

Some relevant discussion in this thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15373992

I've had a great experience with Zenni Optical over the years and it's a LOT less expensive than the alternatives. Regarding the comments "You get what you pay for" - I guess this is somewhat true but the only competitively priced retailer that I've used was Wal-Mart - and those frames were much lower quality. For the money, I thought that Zenni was pretty great.

YMMV.

I have owned the same 4 pair of Zenni's prescription glasses (clear) for over 2 years, and I can say that it's the best $100 I've ever taken a chance on. There were a lot of bad reviews at the time, going in, but at $290 a pair locally, I couldn't resist trying and I'm glad I did. I'm a person who is prone to breaking fragile things, and I can say that with no screw tightening or anything above a rinse in the sink, these glasses still look great, years later.

Zenni is astonishingly good if you know what size frames fit you. If you’ve already got glasses that fit, the dimensions are often printed on the arms.

It takes a bunch of time to check sizes and narrow down the options but 100% worth it. I have 3 pairs that cost $80 total and paid for extra alike high index and anti-glare.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com