Once you need correction for both near and distance vision — usually somewhere past your early forties — you're choosing between two ways of packing more than one prescription into a single lens: bifocals and progressives.
A bifocal lens has a visible line dividing the two zones — distance vision above it, near vision (reading, phone, close work) in the smaller segment below. It's a straightforward, well-understood design, and for a lot of people it works well and costs less than a progressive.
A progressive lens does the same job without the line. Instead of a hard boundary, the prescription changes gradually from top to bottom, adding an intermediate zone in between for arm's-length tasks like a computer screen or a car dashboard — something a bifocal skips entirely. The trade-off is a shorter adjustment period while your eyes learn to find the right part of the lens, and a slightly higher price for the more complex lens design.
Which one actually fits your life comes down to habits more than age: if you spend real time at a screen at arm's length, a progressive's middle zone tends to be worth the adjustment. If your day is mostly distance and up-close reading with little in between, a bifocal is a perfectly good, lower-cost answer.
We fit both at Sight Optics, alongside single-vision and specialist options like high-index lenses for stronger prescriptions and Neurolens for people dealing with digital eye strain. If you're not sure which category you fall into, bring your current prescription in — or message us on WhatsApp — and we'll walk through it with you before you commit to either.