Specialist Equipment

The right advice requires the right information.

We have invested over £160,000 in a
comprehensive array of equipment to ensure we
have the data we need to prescribe the most suitable lenses for you.

We have dedicated Contact Lens equipment that you will not see at an Opticians who does not specialise in Contact Lenses.

Our equipment is 'state of the art' and highly sophisticated. The information we obtain from it plus the 90 years combined experience of our 3 highly skilled Contact Lens Practitioners allows us to fit Contacts to virtually anyone.

$Auto Refractor/Keratometer$

The Auto Refractor/Keratometer records a precise measurement of your error of vision with or without specs or contacts plus the curvature measurements of the front surface of the cornea. We use this information as a starting point for our initial sight testing and fitting of Contact Lenses.

The Electronic Refractor Head - The auto refractor is net-worked into this instrument in each Consulting room. It contains all the trial lenses for testing your sight, which are automatically changed through a dedicated Windows Sight Testing system. This means no old fashioned 'Trial Spec Frame' on the end of your nose with interminable changes of little round spec lenses. For both the patient and the practitioner the sight test is far less tedious and, with less decision making involved, less worries of giving the wrong answer.

The Slit Lamp Binocular Microscope gives us an amazing 45 times magnification of the whole of the front surfaces of the eye and cornea, and also stores digital images to DVD for future reference. As well as early recognition of changes caused by contacts that have become a poor fit it also lets us observe the intra-ocular lens for the earliest signs of cataracts

The IMAGEnet Retinal Camera is the high tech version of the old torch like Ophthalmoscope. It gives us an image of the whole of the picture sensitive viewing surface, the retina, which we can magnify even more and store to computer for future reference.

Apart from serious eye diseases like glaucoma & macular degeneration which can both lead to blindness it allows to spot the early signs of many general health problems such as diabetes, heart, renal conditions etc.

As well as contact lens checks annually a full sight test & internal eye examination is therefore vital at least every 2 years

The Specular Microscope is our latest diagnostic tool. Usually only found in eye hospitals. The very back surface of the cornea called the endothelium is vital to corneal health, and can suffer changes due to prolonged lens wear, or the wearing of insufficiently permeable lenses. This instrument allows us to view the cells at 400 times magnification and also measure and record the corneal thickness so allowing us to resolve a problem before it even starts.

The Non-Contact Tonometer measures the intra-ocular pressure of each eye using a micro pulse of air to screen for glaucoma. glaucoma is one of the most prevalent blinding eye diseases which, diagnosed early enough is fully treatable, so all our patients over the age of 40 are automatically screened at every annual after care check.

Henson Visual Field Screener
When you read letters for us we are only checking your far and near vision at the centre of the eye. Sometimes even if you have excellent central vision, abnormal defects can occur at the edges, which may indicate a serious problem such as glaucoma. Our Field Screener enables us, in minutes to check your peripheral vision for any abnormailty.

Corneal Topographer
This very latest piece of high tech equipment is an incredible tool giving us all kinds of data previously unavailable to us.
It allows us to plot the shape of the whole corneal surface in 3D something never before possible. It has a memory bank of all the designs of contacts available and shows us a simulation of the fitting of any lens actually on your cornea. We can view different types on screen before we decide which will be the most suitable lenses to order. Having made our choice we then email the whole digital file to our laboratory where it is input directly to computer controlled (CNC) lathes which cut all the curves on the lens to directly match your cornea! Only used so far by relatively few Contact Lens Practitioners it has revolutionised fitting in our practice especially for the most complex, astigmats, kerataconics etc. It is also invaluable for OrthoK, the procedure where we modify the corneal shape with contacts to correct vision errors – a much safer technique than invasive corneal surgery such as laser etc. Find out more...