Date:
Friday , June 19, 2009
Author:
Steve Lynch
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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GUNNAR Optiks Digital Performance Eyewear

Who is GUNNAR Optiks? What is Digital Performance Eyewear? Why should you care? Is it all a load marketing BS or do these glasses really work? We put them on, left them on, and three [H] editors are here to share our experiences.

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Conclusion:

We were initially skeptical of GUNNAR Optiks and the claims it made about its products. The company is a bit heavy on the catch phrases with cleverly named products that have equally clever features like i-AMP, i-FI and iONik and so on. Even the "Digital - Performance - Eyewear" product description seemed a bit gimmicky. It was only after getting some real hands on time with these glasses did the skepticism fade away (along with my eye strain).

Brent’s Thoughts:

I would like to say upfront that I do not wear reading glasses; I do not even wear sun glasses. My face is not use to the glass and framework being a part of its feature set. I have a natural discomfort to these glasses that is born out of simply not being use to it. I however never had any comfort issues with the HALOGEN style Gunnar Optiks that were shipped to me.

When I donned the glasses for the first time I was struck with a rather peculiar feeling. They were so close to my face that my eyelashes brushed up against the glasses when I blinked. What an awkward feeling. Perhaps if I curled my eyelashes they would fit? At any rate, I had to move the glasses slightly down on my nose so that I could blink normally without my eyelashes getting friendly with the glasses.

I know these glasses aren’t "fun house" glasses, but working with them on a widescreen 30" LCD seems to give this effect. I very much like the magnifying of the text, which works quite well and makes everything very easy to read and see everything. However, my display is so wide at 30" that the display literally appears slightly concave with these lenses. When I remove the glasses after working a long period of time my display has suddenly turned into a convex configuration. Until my eyes focus and get use to normality again my display for a few minutes appears to bulge outwards in the center.

Indeed, these glasses seemed to reduce eye strain and fatigue after long hours writing. I wore these glasses through the entire night, pulling an all-nighter to finish an article, typically my eyes get quite sore by the end of it all and eye drops are needed. However, at the end of this writing session my eyes felt very comfortable, and at ease surprisingly. That part really does work. I enjoyed a magnified screen and more comfortable eyes while writing.

The biggest question on gamers’ minds, does it improve your accuracy and increase your frag count? Well no, not really. No, I didn’t feel in any way that these glasses improved my multiplayer gaming ability. I spent several nights playing Half Life 2 Deathmatch, Unreal Tournament 3 and Quake 3 for some really fast action. My gaming ability sans glasses matched that of with the glasses. The magnification did help me see things in the distance a bit more clearly, but unless you are a camper, the magnification really didn’t make any difference while gaming.

I played through the brand new game Cryostasis with these glasses. For the first half of the game I played without the glasses, and then the last half of the game I played with the glasses. If you don’t know, Cryostasis takes place on a ship in the North Pole; the colors are very white and blue with a lot of frost and ice. The game itself has some beautiful effects and paints a very winter-esque picture. Once I put the glasses on though, the game turned into a dull, darker, yellow game. I kid you not, the snow and ice all over the place looked like, ahem, "Yellow snow", i.e. like someone peed all in it. The glasses greatly took away from the experience that the game developer intended, simply by changing the color of everything to a shade of yellow.

The glasses also made the games I played darker, I noticed in some spots in Cryostasis it was harder than usual to actually see, I had to turn up the brightness on my LCD to compensate. The multiplayer games I played were also a bit darker. If you are playing a dark game, heaven forbid Doom 3, with these glasses; you are going to end up having to turn the brightness up on your display so you can see better.

As these glasses helped me in writing an article during late night hours, these glasses also allowed me to play for hours at end playing games without my eyes throwing a fit. I even spun up a game while I was already tired, with my eyes feeling a bit heavy with allergies, and even under those circumstances my eyes did not feel strained at all while I was playing some fast action multiplayer. These glasses really have the reduced eye fatigue and strain feature down.

The Gunnar glasses work great for productivity as is, I noticed reduced eye strain and fatigue, and the magnification helps reading text. I feel these glasses may work better on screens smaller than 30", a 30" screen is pushing the limits of these glasses due to the bending affect noted in the article. These glasses are light and you really don’t notice you are wearing them after a while. These glasses do what they are advertised to do.

I would certainly recommend these glasses to anybody, especially those hard working office people burning their retinas starring behind a computer in their cubicles. Or us hard working [H] editors burning the midnight oil to produce content for you, the reader.

Steve's Thoughts:

My comments will run a bit short as I have shared a lot of my thoughts previously. Obviously GUNNAR Optiks are not for everyone. If you spend less than a few hours a day on the computer, you may not see the benefit of these glasses. If you are like us, and I know most of you are, you will see an immediate and long term benefit from using these glasses. It has been over a month since I started wearing the Onyx Catalyst Rockets every day and they have made a vast improvement in the way I see things. Your mileage may vary but I have no reservation in recommending these glasses to anyone that considers themselves a heavy computer user

Kyle's Thoughts:

I have been wearing the Shredder Onyx Amber for over a month now. I do not normally wear glasses, outside of sunglasses. Let me start out with what I do not like about this particular model. And keep in mind that none of us had the ability to try them on and see which ones we liked; they were simply shipped to us to evaluate; much like what you would be faced with buying these at an online retailer.

The Shredder style Gunnar glasses are extremely uncomfortable to me. The nose pieces feel like someone has used toothpicks to affix the things to my face about 45 minutes of wearing them. I have them on top of my head right now because they got painful to wear. The very small nose pads are not aligned with my nose, or so I thought. I headed to a mirror and tried to bend the pads around to lie more comfortably on my nose. After a month of this, I still have not been able to make the glasses comfortable to wear. Since I am sensitive to the nose pads, I would probably be a lot better off with a pair of the Halogen model that has a bridge on it with a lot more surface area. All the sunglasses I wear have this type of bridge and feel fine to me.

The other major peeve I have about the glasses are that I can see the reflection of my face inside the lenses. I put them on and I can see my own eyeballs. My realization of these comes and goes, and for the most part it is not a deal breaker, just very odd. It seems that the lens color makes me sensitive to this.

This review is very interesting to me because I was going to purchase a pair of these before I was ever offered the opportunity to review them. I simply did not purchase them because they "cost too much" and I felt as though some of the marketing claims came off as a bit cheesy and over the top. Like this line on Gunnar’s homepage currently.

Be a Gunnar Stunna Like DJ Whoo Kid! Gunnar Optiks Shades for Gamers

On that note it seems that Gunnar is somewhat more worried about being the cool kid on the block rather than helping fix a problem of mine. That is a bit of a turn off.

While I have no problem with dry eye or my eye feeling tired or strained, I did find a tremendous benefit of Gunnar’s "fRACTYLE lens geometry." I could simply see text on the screen that much better. As Steve’s previous video shows, it makes everything on my monitors easier to read and it is not uncommon for me to edit 10,000 words a week sitting at my desk. These glasses do magnify the screen a bit, but nothing tremendous. Also, I use a 30" main monitor, the same as Brent, and I do not get the convex/concave issues that he experienced with his glasses. Maybe that is due to the specific model?

I am not a big fan of the "AMBeR" lens tint as is Brent. I would like to experience some of Gunnar’s other colors as well, but it seems that "AMBeR" is all that is being retailed currently. So if you like that old Cessna pilot look… The lenses also clean up extremely easily. If you have a shirt tail you are in quickly back business in business with just a couple of wipes.

For gaming, I found the Gunnar’s gave me no advantages of any kind. In fact, I do not like how the yellow colored lenses change the color pallet from what the game developers intended. When gaming, I take them off. The only upside I see to Gunnar’s and gaming is the ability to hold moisture to your eyes by simply being a barrier if you suffer from dry eye after gaming a while . But surely, you don’t need to pony up from $79 to $189 to do that. A $7 pair of clear glasses from a drug store will do that.

In closing, I would like to say Gunnar’s are not "cheap," both in terms of expense or build quality. I talked about adjusting my nose pads above. I started doing this with a pair of pliers. I have been waiting to break the frames while prying on them, but the Gunnar’s have stayed in perfect shape. I have dropped them on tile several times as well and no damage. The Gunnar’s are tough to say the least and not a cheaply made product. The Gunnar’s are very well built and can handle their share of abuse. After beating of them for a month, mine still pass for new out of the box, except for the plier mark.

The Bottom Line

GUNNAR Optiks performance eyewear provided a real benefit to all three HardOCP editors that tried them out. The products and packaging are very high quality, have a one year warranty, so the only thing you have to lose is eye strain and from $80 to $200 of your hard earned money. Obviously price could be a big sticking point on buying these.

This morning as of editing this and writing the conclusion statements for this article, we all talked via IM.

You still using your Gunnar's? Want to keep them? Have them on right now?

Brent: No. No. No. "To be quite honest, they aren't really for me in the long run.... I really really hate the color difference and fish bowl effect after a while."

Steve: Yes. Yes. Yes. "I wear the Gunnar Opitks glasses daily and, given the choice of going with or without them, I definitely would rather have them."

Kyle: Yes. No. Yes. The Shredder model is simply not comfortable for me, so Brent is sending me his HAOLOGEN model to try and see if they are a better fit."

GUNNAR - Digital Performance Eyewear

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