I wear glasses and recently significantly increased the power on one of the lenses (weirdly, not in the other). I also got larger lenses (so distortion that happens in the corner is increased because the corner is farther from the midpoint than before).

The main issue with the new lenses which I noticed was chromatic aberration. Unfortunately my brain can’t fix this in post though it has gotten used to it a bit. Something that I suppose I already knew was that the lens material would affect how much of this distortion you would see. I thought different refractive indices would give different amounts of dispersion, though maybe I should not have thought that as lower indices would mean thicker lenses so more distance to disperse in which might cancel out the lower disposition. In the end it doesn’t matter what I thought, the Lens material does affect the dispersion.

The thing I was more surprised by was that dispersion wasn’t something that came up when making the choice of lens material. Thinking back though, perhaps the only qualities discussed were “thickness” and cost. I put thickness in quotes as maybe the weight was discussed too. I feel like dispersion is quite an important thing I care about and I wonder why it wasn’t discussed. Perhaps it is hard to explain to people (I guess all the material properties are hard to explain), or perhaps it is difficult if the lenses don’t necessarily get better in every way as cost goes up.

There are no glasses lenses which can correct for their chromatic aberration like camera lenses, presumably because they would be too thick and delicate.

In a more general sense, I’m surprised that there’s so little variety in optometrists (at least in the U.K.). Basically wherever you go you get the same precision of prescription and are then given the opportunity to buy some glasses. Some studies have shown that the accuracy of the prescription you get from the subjective refractometry exam can vary a lot between practices but there is no way to know if a practice will be good or bad. I’m also surprised that there is not really a way to get a more accurate or precise prescription than the standard, as I would think that if such a thing existed it would be able to find customers at least in larger population centres. Maybe it would be impossible to improve on the status quo because of the lack of economies of scale or because glasses won’t be in a consistent enough position or because the rich people who would be expected to pay floor the service opt for eye surgery instead.

This comment is so far mostly unrelated to the OP though so I will make another comment: I wish the article had mentioned some of the physics behind the different aberrations, for example the reason longitudinal aberration is hard to correct in post is that it os an effect where different colours are focused to different distances and it of hard to make a colour less out-of-focus to fix it. The reason a bokeh light circle is a certain shape is that that is the shape of the lens aperture (hence usually a circle or many-gon). The misshapen bokeh effects tend To come from light coming in at more acute angles and from those angles the lens is a different shape.